Category / Faculty

by emoryhistorydept

Lowery, Cahoon Family Endowed Chair Featured by Emory 2036 Campaign

Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, the Cahoon Family Professor of American History, was recently featured as part of the Emory 2036 campaign. The video feature discusses Lowery’s background and work since arriving at Emory in 2021, including her leading scholarship in the field of indigenous studies, creative practice as a filmmaker, and work building transformative partnerships with indigenous communities. The feature also describes the origins and significance of the Cahoon Family endowed chair, including with commentary by emeritus trustee Susan Cahoon 68C. Watch the full feature below:

Malinda Maynor Lowery featured in an Emory 2036 campaign video.
by emoryhistorydept

Anderson Dissects Changes to Electoral Processes by GA Election Board

Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has published an article about recent changes made to electoral processes by the Georgia Board of Elections. Co-authored with Norman Eisen (State Democracy Defenders Action) and Lauren Groh-Wargo (Fair Fight), the MSNBC article dissects the implications of these changes, such as a new rule that “lets local elections officials halt vote-counting and delay or even outright refuse certification if they contend there are any irregularities, essentially making the certification of election results discretionary.”

Anderson, Eisen, and Groh-Wargo describe these efforts as laying the foundation for the obstruction of the certification of the 2024 election results in Georgia. Read an excerpt of their piece below along with the full article: “Trump and his allies are previewing their election sabotage plan in Georgia.”

“Trump’s 2020 election interference playbook hasn’t changed, but the MAGA operation has become more sophisticated. Now, there are election deniers holding local elections positions in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania (in addition to Georgia). GOP officials have resisted certifying results in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada. 

“But Georgia elections are facing an attack from Trump’s operation that seems more intense than any of its other efforts across the country. The state’s current lieutenant governor signed a certificate saying Trump won Georgia in 2020 and certifying himself as a false elector. After failing to overturn his 2020 loss, it seems Trump aims to win Georgia by any means, aided by the State Election Board. Trump may be hinting at this strategy, recently claiming he “didn’t need the votes,” an odd statement for a presidential candidate.”

by emoryhistorydept

New Books Series: Q&A with Maria R. Montalvo about ‘Enslaved Archives’


Dr. Maria R. Montalvo, Assistant Professor of History, recently published her first book, Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past, with Johns Hopkins University Press. The book explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at UC-Berkeley, described Montalvo’s work as “a profound ‘history within a history’ of slavery” and “a welcome, necessary addition to the study of the American slave trade.”

In the Q&A below, Dr. Montalvo gives us a glimpse into the making of the monograph as part of the History Department’s New Faculty Publications series.

Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.

I started working on my book, in the form of a dissertation, in graduate school. If we count from the first time I set foot in the archive, then I started trying to figure out what I was going to write about in 2014. I like to think that I found my project in the archive, specifically, the New Orleans Public Library, which houses civil and criminal court records from New Orleans between 1803 and the 1920s. When I arrived, I knew I was interested in finding warranty disputes that centered on enslaved individuals, but I had no idea what it would take to find exactly what I was looking for or how my project would change during the looking. I don’t remember a specific lightbulb moment, when I knew exactly what I was doing or where it was all going. I remember a lot of little moments, alone with the lawsuits I’d found, in the library with friends and colleagues, or in my advisor’s office, when smaller things started to click and ideas began to come together. The book bears my name alone, but I did not write or conceive of it by myself. In the ten-year lifespan of putting this thing together, I’ve been able to lean on mentors, friends, editors, and colleagues. I couldn’t have written the book, or finally decided it was finished, on my own.

What was the research process like?

The research process was intense and time consuming. I looked through over 18,000 sets of civil court records while also trying to create a new, more efficient way of interacting with these sources. Sifting through thousands of court records took a lot of time and effort, as did closely reading the relevant ones and working to make sense of them. The result of all that time and effort is miles of notes and diary entries wherein my analysis began to take shape. Looking back, I’m glad I wrote down as much as I did about my process. It helped when it came to thinking through things, remembering what I’d seen in the archive, and of course, writing.

Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?

I think I’m partial to chapter one, which is and is not about an enslaved child named John. When I wrote my dissertation, I overlooked John, mentioning him, I think, 6 times in a chapter that he was not at the center of. I unwittingly brushed him aside in the interest of telling a more detailed story. And once I realized what I’d done, I wanted to see what it would mean to put John—someone who we find and lose in a single contract—at the center of his own history. The end result is not something that generates new biographical information about John, that’s unfortunately something we can’t do. But it is something that gets us closer to making sense of the world he lived in and the choices he may have believed he had.

How does this project align with your broad research agenda?

As a historian, I’m motivated by questions about how power is created, used, and preserved over time. My book centers on exploring the relationship between the production of enslaved property and violence, both historical and archival. In that way, it’s about the origins and extent of enslavers’ power over the people they enslaved. On the horizon, I see myself continuing to interrogate archival production as a means of understanding the entanglements of race, capitalism, and the freedom in the nineteenth-century United States.  

by emoryhistorydept

Brandeis Invites Suh to Discuss ‘The Allure of Empire’

0060801-23KH Chris Suh, Assistant Professor US in the World; Asian American History; Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; the Progressive Era enviro portrait F/Emory News Ctr April Hunt

Earlier this year Dr. Chris Suh, Assistant Professor of History, delivered a lecture for Brandeis University entitled “Between the ‘American Century’ and the ‘Asian Century’: Toward a New Paradigm for Understanding Racial Inequality.” Drawing on his 2023 book The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (Oxford UP), Suh’s lecture addressed the influence of American geopolitical interests on Asian race relations as well as historical and contemporary racial tensions in the US. Student journalist Sophia De Lisi covered the lecture for the Justice, Brandeis’s independent student newspaper. Find a quote from her insightful article below, along with the full piece: “Professor Chris Suh explains how American geopolitics inform Asian race-relations.”

“Like all books, my book is a product of its time,” Professor Suh said. “I was writing it in the late 2010s, and the early 2020s, where there was a lot of anxiety about whether U.S. international dominance was finally coming to an end.” He explained that the second half of the 20th Century was characterized by the United States’ Cold War victory against the Soviet Union, and that this victory gave the U.S. the foundation necessary to lead an “unipolar world order.” Suh referenced Henry Luce’s essay, “The American Century” to expand on this period of global dominance that the U.S. had built over the 20th century.

Suh explained that despite the U.S.’ past successes, the 21st Century has seen potential for Asian countries — given their rising economic, military and political power — to overtake the lead that the United States has held for the last century. He expanded on the Biden administration’s current foreign policy strategy in Asia, stating that it is “very much a resumption” of former President Barack Obama’s administration policy, known as “Pivot to Asia” and “Rebalance to Asia and the Pacific.” Suh said that the intent of these policies was to both reduce tensions in the Middle East after the Iraq and Afghanistan War and give the U.S. a way to enter “strategic alliances” with Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand “in response to the rise of the [People’s Republic of China.]”

by emoryhistorydept

Lal in TIME: “What a Mughal Princess Can Teach Us About Feminist History”


Dr. Ruby Lal, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently author an article in TIME, “What a Mughal Princess Can Teach Us About Feminist History.” Lal’s piece centers on her latest book, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale, 2023), which chronicles the life of Princess Gulbadan, a fascinating figure who travelled widely and authored the sole extant work of prose by a woman in the early decades of the Mughal Empire. Lal’s article also addresses the marginalization of feminist and women’s histories, both in Gulbadan’s time and our own. Read an excerpt from the TIME article below along with the full article. Also listen to an interview with Lal on WABE’s City Lights.

“Books and chronicles from centuries past are precious gifts. Holding onto their words, we can delve into the beauty and torments of human life. With such rare possessions, we come close to another time; watch her creation, her uncertainties, her discoveries, the stuff of history. But uncovering feminist history is a slow process, and too often, women historians are the only ones willing to do that work. Beveridge taught herself Persian to reveal Gulbadan’s history. I have spent years combining hundreds of documents to assemble the adventures of daring and imaginative Mughal women.”

by emoryhistorydept

Stein Discusses War in Gaza on LiveNOW

Dr. Kenneth Stein, Emeritus Professor of History, recently discussed the war in Gaza on LiveNOW, a national news service powered by FOX television stations. Stein analyzes the state of the military campaign, humanitarian needs of Gaza residents, and the geopolitical implications of the war. A scholar and public intellectual, Stein has contributed widely to scholarship and policy on contemporary Middle Eastern history, political science, and Israeli studies. Watch the conversation here: “Gaza ceasefire: Israel has agreed to a framework, US says.”

by emoryhistorydept

PhD Candidate Anjuli Webster Publishes Articles in Journals of African and World History


African history graduate student Anjuli Webster has published two new articles drawing on her doctoral research. The first, a short piece titled “Water and History in Southern Africa,” was published as an Open Access “History Matters” contribution in the Journal of African History. The second article, titled “Inter-Imperial Entanglement: The British Claim to Portuguese Delagoa Bay in the Nineteenth Century,” appeared in the Journal of World History. Webster wrote the original version of this article in the graduate student seminar (HIST 584) and under the supervision of Drs. Clifton Crais and Jason Morgan Ward. Webster thanks the Research Workshop in History at Emory for support in the process of revisions and the History PhD program for funding image reproduction fees.

Webster’s dissertation, “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in southern Africa, 1750-1900,” explores transformations in sovereignty and ecology in southern Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries. She has won many grants for her research, including from the American Society for Environmental History, Harvard Center for History and Economics, the Luso-American Development Foundation, and Emory’s “Visions of Slavery” Mellon Sawyer Seminar.

by emoryhistorydept

Anderson Analyzes ‘White Rage’ for NPR’s ‘Created Equal’


Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently a guest on “Created Equal,” a radio show/podcast hosted by award-winning journalists Stephen Henderson and Laura Weber Davis out of WDET in Detroit. The conversation draws on Anderson’s 2016 book White Rage: the Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury), which analyzes how and why historic gains by African Americans toward full(er) democratic citizenship in the U.S. have, throughout the nation’s history, consistently accompanied a “white reaction [that] has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains.” Find the Feb 7, 2024 interview on the “Created Equal” archive stream (organized by date) here: “What is white rage? And what really divides our nation?“

by emoryhistorydept

Chira’s ‘Patchwork Freedoms’ Wins ASWAD Book Prize

Adriana Chira


The Association for the Worldwide Study of the African Diaspora has awarded Adriana Chira’s Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022) with its First Book Prize. The ASWAD prize marks the book’s fifth award, following: Honorable Mention, Best Book, Nineteenth Century Section, from the Latin American Studies Association; the 2023 Elsa Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians; the American Historical Association’s Rawley Prize; and the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. Patchwork Freedoms was released as part of Cambridge’s Afro-Latin America series. Learn about this year’s other ASWAD prize winners. Congratulations, Professor Chira!

by emoryhistorydept

Suddler Speaks at Landmark European Soccer Summit on Anti-racism and Gender equity

Carl Suddler (far right) with top current and former European soccer players

Dr. Carl Suddler, Associate Professor of History, recently spoke at a landmark gathering of European soccer players held in the United Kingdom. The conference brought together towering figures of the sport, such as Lilian Thuram, Thierry Henry, Christian Karembeu, Robert Pires, Olivier Dacourt, Zé Maria, Viv Anderson, and Stan Collymore, seeking to advance anti-racist and gender equity initiatives in the game. The Emory News Center published a wonderful feature of Suddler’s experience, including how the players inspired him to expand his talk beyond the planned topic – the history of US activism in sport – to broach why countries around the world struggle to reckon with the racialized inequities and prejudices that have long structured their societies. Suddler is the author, most recently, of Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (NYU, 2019). Read the full Emory News Center piece here: “Emory professor Carl Suddler speaks at landmark European soccer summit seeking anti-racism, gender-equity actions.”