Category / Faculty

by emoryhistorydept

Allitt Offers Analysis of Royal Visit for Newsweek, AJC, and 11Alive


Dr. Patrick Allitt, Cohoon Family Professor of American History, provided insightful analysis and historical context about the recent four-day visit of King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the United States. Allitt wrote an op-ed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “King Charles III and America’s curious love affair with the British monarchy,” and was interviewed on the Atlanta NBC News affiliate 11Alive (“Why Americans remain fascinated by the monarchy“).

Allitt was also quoted in a Newsweek article that examined the visit and its significance. Read a section of the Newsweek piece below, and find the full article here: “King Charles to Address Press Dinner Shooting in Landmark Congress Speech.”

Patrick Allitt, Professor of History at Emory University, told Newsweek: “The king’s had a lifetime of experience in not talking about policy details. I think when he was younger, he periodically did make some rather gauche intrusions into policy questions, particularly about the environment but gradually, he’s learned the lesson that his job is to be head of state and not head of government

Allitt argued the monarchy was a powerful tool for warming up public opinion and said that “because the British monarchy is insanely popular in America, even Trump has got the good sense to realize, ‘I can only benefit from showing the king and his wife a good time’ and avoiding all the things which have created rancor between himself and Starmer.

“So it’s actually a very non-political event, even though people will construe it as being one with political resonances.”

“The nature of politics in both countries is that people from different parts of the spectrum disagree about the rights and wrongs of what’s happening,” he continued, “but I think that the really astonishing part of this whole story is that for nearly 250 years, or since 1815, since the end of the War of 1812, Britain and America have never gone to war against each other.

“And usually when one empire is in decline and another one is in the ascendance, they fight over it but in this case, they never did.”

by emoryhistorydept

Emory Students Analyze “Sports, Power, and Society” in Course Co-Taught by Suddler


In the spring 2026 semester, Dr. Carl Suddler, Associate Professor of History, and Emory sociologist Dr. Karida Brown have offered an interdisciplinary course called “Sports, Power, and Society.” Building on the “Last Lectures” series, a curriculum developed by Civil Rights icon and sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards, the course analyzes how sport intersects with an array of topics, from race, politics, and fashion to urban planning, inequality, and global power.

Students in the spring course have benefitted from the proximity of the upcoming FIFA World Cup, which will bring the high-stakes global soccer to Atlanta and 15 other host cities in North America this summer. Atlanta and Los Angeles are the only two cities in the U.S. to host both a summer Olympic games and the World Cup. This fact, Suddler and Brown argue, have made Emory the ideal place to study the power of sport in shaping culture, cities, economies, and everyday life.

Emory History graduate students Andrew Aldridge (U.S. History, 5th year) and Tymesha-Elizabeth Kindell (U.S. History, 2nd year) serve as teaching assistants for the course.


Fox 5 Atlanta recently interviewed Suddler about the offering, the World Cup’s impact on Atlanta, and parallels between the 2026 mega event and the 1996 Olympics. Find the conversation here: “Emory offers class on impact of FIFA World Cup.”

by emoryhistorydept

LaChance Speaks at GSU Law Event about the Death Penalty


L-R: Herman Lindsey, Cortney Lawler,  Corinna Barret Lain,  Katherine Raeymaekers (Consul General of Belgium), Daniel LaChance


Dr. Daniel LaChance, Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Law and Associate Professor of History, recently spoke at a public event about the death penalty hosted by the School of Law at Georgia State University. Organized by the consulates of Belgium, France, Ireland, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the event was titled “Justice or Injustice? Moral and Legal Questions Around Capital Punishment.” Find the full program here.

LaChance is a legal scholar working at the intersection of American legal and cultural history, criminology, and literary studies. He is the author of Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television (Stanford University Press, 2022).

by emoryhistorydept

Byrnes (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘The United States and the Ends of Empire’


Dr. Sean T. Byrnes, a 2014 graduate of the doctoral program in U.S. history, recently published his second book, The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776, with Bloomsbury Press. The four-century history examines the relationship between the United States, empire, and decolonization from the revolutionary war through the present.

Fellow Emory History Department alum Dr. Elizabeth Stice (Palm Beach Atlantic University) recently interviewed Byrnes about his new monograph. Find their conversation here: “Interview with Sean Byrnes, author of ‘The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776.’”

Byrnes’s research centers on U.S. politics, international relations, and global economic inequality. His first book, Disunited Nations: U.S. Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, was published by LSU Press in 2021. His writings have also appeared in Time, The New Republic, Dissent, Jacobin, Diplomatic History, Diplomatica, International Journal, and for the History News Network. He hosts conversations with authors on the New Books Network, serves on the Board of Editors for Federal History, and is a Section Editor for the newly released Routledge Online Encyclopedia of the Cold War.

Byrnes completed his doctoral training under the advisement of Dr. Fraser Harbutt.

Read an abstract of the Byrnes’s new book below and learn more via Bloomsbury Press.

Few topics are more important to understanding the origins of the modern world than decolonization, and few countries have played a more important role in that history than the United States.In this book, Sean T. Byrnes provides a definitive, single-volume account of the relationship between the United States, decolonization, and world order.

Through a lively narrative history that ranges across four centuries, Byrnes reveals how the process of ending and replacing empires defined the American relationship to the world from the colonial era to the present. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution, hierarchies born of the imperial age—and defined by ideas about race, capitalism, and civilization—fundamentally shaped American views of who was entitled to sovereignty and when. Therefore, far from building a world of “Westphalian” sovereign equality, the United States instead manipulated, expanded, and then attempted to dominate globe spanning structures of wealth and power that served the few at the expense of the many.

From early interactions with Native Americans and a decolonizing Latin America, to efforts to bolster global hierarchies after the World Wars and influence the postcolonial “Third World”, The United States and the Ends of Empire, tells the story of a US that may not always have embraced formal empire but nevertheless still sought to organize the world in imperial ways. In the process, it reveals how Americans helped build today’s modern, globalized world—and the unequal hierarchies of wealth and power that define it.

by emoryhistorydept

Allitt Moderates Conversation with Jon Meacham at the Atlanta History Center


The Atlanta History Center (AHC) recently hosted Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham in conversation with Dr. Patrick Allitt of the Emory History Department. Meacham spoke about his new book, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union (Penguin Random House, 2026), which “unites centuries of essential American voices to understand our national debates and divisions from 1619 to the present.” David Plazas, opinion editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, published a piece about the AHC event (subscription required) here.

Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History and the author of seven books, including, most recently, A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (Penguin Random House, 2014).

by emoryhistorydept

Benjamin P. Hein (C, ’10) Publishes ‘The Migrant’s Spirit’ with Cambridge UP


Dr. Benjamin P. Hein, a 2010 Emory History alum and now Assistant Professor at Brown University, has published his first book: The Migrant’s Spirit: How Industrial Modernity Came to the German Lands (Oxford UP, 2025). Weaving economic history and the history of financial institutions with immigration and cultural history, The Migrant’s Spirit locates the impetus for Germany’s industrial modernization in transatlantic exchanges between German society and the expanding German diaspora in nineteenth-century North America.

Hein completed honors in history working with Professors Astrid M. Eckert and Brian Vick. He was awarded the 2010 Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award, given to a graduating student who displays high academic achievement and good works in the community. He received his PhD at Stanford University in 2018.

Read the full description of The Migrant’s Spirit:

When a process popularly known as the Industrial Revolution first took hold in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, many contemporaries were stunned by the scale and ferocity of the transformation. While Germany had long been considered a promising place to industrialize, given its historic ties to New World markets, skilled and educated workforce, and deep pockets of wealth, progress had been slow due to persistent indifference and skepticism across society. That people should have suddenly dropped their reservations and simply embraced the new industrial modernity defied all explanation. Grasping for answers, some concluded that the Germans must have fallen under the spell of the “capitalist spirit.”

Benjamin P. Hein locates the impetus for the abrupt transformation of German society after ca. 1850 in its cultural exchange with the country’s burgeoning diaspora in North America, one of the largest in this century. In correspondence and other “news from America,” the emigrants conveyed to their families, communities, and business associates in Europe a different set of norms and ethics regarding work, entrepreneurship, and commerce. By making it socially acceptable and politically meaningful to frequently change professions or to organize businesses as joint-stock corporations, they inadvertently mobilized an otherwise reluctant population for a more centralized regime of production that served global market forces instead of local needs and corporatist norms. They also helped popularize key institutional pillars of the new economy, like the universal bank, and inspired innovative commercial reforms, most notably the “limited liability partnership” (LLP), or “G.m.b.H.” in German, which became the legal foundation of Germany’s particularly robust small-business economy.

While addressing global trends, The Migrant’s Spirit makes these phenomena comprehensible through the lives of individuals who faced painful choices and moral quandaries as they attempted to navigate a new social and economic order and began to trust countrymen abroad over local sources of guidance. By reconstructing their struggles, Hein sheds new light on the transatlantic dimensions of Germany’s path to industrial modernity.

by emoryhistorydept

History Major Rafael Escoto Publishes Paper in ‘Central Europe Yearbook’


Junior history major Rafi Escoto recently published a paper in the Central Europe Yearbook, an open-access journal promoting the study of Central Europe among undergraduate students. Titled “Everything Old is New Again: Border Rituals and the Return of History in ‘Green Border,’” Escoto’s paper analyses Agnieszka Holland’s 2023 film about refugees from the Middle East and Africa who attempt to reach the European Union, only to become caught up in a geopolitical crisis triggered by the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.

Escoto initially wrote this paper in “HIST 145: The History of Now,” which is taught by Profs. Matthew Payne and Astrid M. Eckert. Find the abstract below, and read the complete work here: “Everything Old is New Again: Border Rituals and the Return of History in ‘Green Border.‘”

This paper argues that Green Border (2023), directed by Agnieszka Holland, transforms the Polish-Belarusian border into a site of moral ritual, where sacred violence replaces humanitarian law. Using Durkheim’s theories, Eastern European memory studies, and analyses of populism and asylum policy, the paper interprets the film as a historical recurrence rather than a modern crisis. Drawing on scholars like Törnquist-Plewa, Exeler, and Krastev, the analysis reveals how Europe’s border politics ritualize exclusion and revive authoritarian patterns under democratic guise. Methods include close film analysis and engagement with secondary literature on EU identity, populism, and the symbolic politics of migration.

by emoryhistorydept

Bhattacharyya (PhD, ’14) Investigates Climate Management History with Major Grant from Swiss National Science Foundation


Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya, a 2014 doctoral program alum, was recently awarded a competitive, multi-year grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for the project, “Climate Risk Management: A Historical Perspective.” The project investigates the role of financial institutions in the making of climate science, including by engaging financial institutions’ archives from the 18th century onward, and addresses the fundamental question, “Why have we overwhelmingly turned to the market to tackle the climate crisis?” The full abstract of the project follows:

This project explores why market-based tools – such as carbon trading, weather derivatives, parametric insurance, and catastrophe bonds – have become central to managing climate risk. Examining insurance archives from the eighteenth century onward, it analyzes how financial institutions shaped meteorological knowledge, risk measurement tools, underwriting policies and enforcement mechanisms. The research aims to explain how the business of risk management influenced evolving conceptions of climate and why market mechanisms, rather than regulation, dominate current climate-risk governance. 

Bhattacharyya is Professor of the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich. She is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History. She completed her doctorate under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.

by emoryhistorydept

Lena Oak Suk (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘In the Darkness of the Cinema’


Doctoral program alum Dr. Lena Oak Suk (PhD, ’14) has published her first book, In the Darkness of the Cinema: Gender and Moviegoing in Early Twentieth-Century Urban Brazil, with Pittsburgh University Press. Focused on the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Suk’s work offers an innovative analysis of how movies and moviegoers reshaped gendered perceptions and gendered realities in urban Brazil at the beginning of the last century. Rielle Navitski (University of Georgia) praises In the Darkness of the Cinema as “an engaging account of how the movies transformed urban space and women’s participation in public life in Brazil.”

Suk is a research affiliate at the Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Director of Investigator Skill-Building in the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship & Creative Endeavor at UT. She completed her graduate training under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.

Read the abstract of Suk’s monograph below, and find more information on Pittsburgh UP’s book page.

Gender and sexual morality, and their intersections with race and class, were central to the formation of urban Brazil in the twentieth century. In the Darkness of the Cinema takes a wide-ranging and innovative approach to gender and moviegoing culture in Brazilian society. By focusing on the flirtations and romances of the movie theater, as well as the intrigue and moral panic that they caused, Suk creates a rich portrait of spectatorship. Where women went to the movies, who they met, and what they did in the darkness were key questions that brewed among overlapping but disparate circles, from film intellectuals and filmmakers to legislators and public health officials, as well as the moviegoers themselves. Amassing sources located traditionally within film culture as well as outside of it, such as film magazines, interviews, comics, literature, and songs, Suk shows that movie theaters and moviegoers made an indelible mark on the urban landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

by emoryhistorydept

Claudia Kreklau (PhD, ’18) Publishes ‘The Making of Modern Eating’


Dr. Claudia Kreklau, an alumnus of the Emory history doctoral program, has published The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780-1910 with Berghahn Books. In this, her first monograph, Kreklau traces the origins of modern foodways and culinary practices in central Europe in the nineteenth century and explores how an array of individuals expressed self-understandings through food.

Jim Brophy, Francis H. Squire Professor of History at the University of Delaware, describes The Making of Modern Eating as “a tour de force that promises to be a field-defining work.” Kreklau, he continues, is “a historian with a capacious and bold historical imagination…a rising star in our field.”

Kreklau is Honorary Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews, and she is the three-time prize-winning author of seven academic articles. She completed her PhD in 2018 under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick.