On Thursday, September 15, Dr. Kylie M. Smith will deliver the National Institutes of Health’s James H. Cassedy Lecture in the History of Medicine. An expert in the history of race in health care and the history of psychiatry, Smith will deliver a presentation titled, “Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South.” Smith is Associate Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing & the Humanities in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. She is also Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read coverage of the event in The Washington Post, view the talk description below, and tune in to the live video stream feed on Thursday, September 15 at 2pm.
In 1969, after a protracted legal battle, Judge Frank M. Johnson of Alabama ordered that segregation of that state’s psychiatric hospitals was illegal and unconstitutional. In his judgement, Johnson drew on government inspections and grass roots legal activism to critique the terrible conditions that prevailed for Black patients. In this lecture Dr. Smith will give a preview of her forthcoming book Jim Crow in the Asylum in which she will demonstrate that racial segregation in psychiatric hospitals in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi was supported by underlying racist ideologies and has had long term consequences for psychiatric care in the South. This research draws on extensive records from the NLM, national and state archives, and the papers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and is supported by the G13 Grant from the National Library of Medicine.
In the fall of 2022 the Emory History Department welcomes Dr. Laura Nenzi, a social historian of early modern Japan, as Acting Full Professor. In the latest installment of our Welcoming New Faculty series, Dr. Nenzi offers a glimpse into her research and teaching along with what drew her to Emory.
Tell us about the focus of your research and principal current project.
I am a social historian of early modern Japan. I enjoy writing history in different scales, from the very small (the life of an ordinary person) to the large (trends spanning two and a half centuries). I have written about travel culture, commercial publishers, space, identity, and about political activism in the nineteenth century. I have published two books, both of which put women at the center of historical investigation.
My current project is a history of the night in early modern Japan (1600-1868). It started out as an antiquarian curiosity: what happened in Edo (Tokyo) after dark? Through the mid-nineteenth century Edo, the largest city in the world, home to one million people, lacked one of the key features of the modern night: public illumination. At the same time, other elements associated with the modern night—regulation, consumption, imagination, and sociability—were firmly in place. This is where my antiquarian curiosity led to a legitimate historical inquiry, for Japan’s early modern night muddles the conventional divide between the pre-industrial and the modern eras and compels us to revisit assumptions about Japan’s modernization, technology-driven histories, and ultimately about narratives of the global nighttime.
Was there a particularly memorable moment from archival or field research that has had a lasting impact on your work or career?
Any historian will tell you that the serendipitous discoveries in the archives and the small things that escalate into something big are among the best parts of our job. For me, this happened as I was thinking about the subject of my second book, Kurosawa Tokiko, a fortuneteller, poet, and rural teacher who became a political activist in the 1850s. Her actions were ultimately inconsequential, and so she is not (or was not, I should say) a well-known figure in the history of late Tokugawa Japan. My first attempt to retrieve one of her manuscript diaries ended in failure, because, I found out, it had been destroyed during the Tokyo air raids of 1945. A librarian suggested I reach out to her descendants and found a street address where they could be reached. No email. So, I wrote and mailed a letter. This led to an invitation to visit her native home, which local activists were trying to preserve, and the local archives. I showed up expecting three or four documents, and would have been happy with that. They started bringing out the envelopes. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… at fourteen I stopped counting, they kept going. I knew right there and then that I had a book to write. To this day I remain friends with the people who helped me rescue her from oblivion. After the book came out, they used it as evidence that there is interest in her story outside the confines of her town and that her home should indeed be preserved. A win-win for everyone.
What sort of courses – undergraduate or graduate – are you most excited to offer at Emory?
There are Japanese History undergraduate courses in the catalog that I am inheriting and that I am very happy to teach, but I am most excited to introduce two new ones that have been among my most popular undergraduate classes at my previous institution: The History of Tokyo and The Samurai: Fact, Fiction, Fantasy. The department has a commitment to transnational, comparative, and global themes, so I will also be offering graduate and undergraduate classes that look at various interactions between Japan and the outside world between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Some of these I have done before, and some are new and based on very recent, very exciting scholarship that I cannot wait to share with my students.
What drew you to Emory?
The departmental and institutional commitment to and support for academic excellence. The freedom to discuss issues that, more and more, are being censored elsewhere as “divisive.” My colleagues in the department, some of whom have written books and articles I have been using for years in my classes, and my colleagues in the department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures. The possibility to train my own graduate students. Also, as someone who taught professionalization seminars for many years, I am in awe of Emory’s TATTO program and excited to be part of it. Emory’s overall commitment to diversity and inclusion. The diverse student body. Atlanta. So, pretty much everything.
Professor Hank Klibanoff, James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently spoke before the City Club of Cleveland about his work on racially-motivated killings in the U.S. South during the Civil Rights era and since. Klibanoff founded the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project and is the host of the Buried Truths podcast. He was also recently confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the Federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board. Klibanoff’s talk in Cleveland is available on The Sound of Ideas, Ideastream Public Media’s weekday morning news and information program focusing on Northeast Ohio: “Examining racial murders of the Civil Rights era, and drawing connections to hate crimes of today.”
“The thing about a lie is, if you say it enough and convincingly, it becomes the truth,” said Anderson, Charles Howard Candler professor and chair of African American Studies at Emory University. “We’re in a war for American democracy right now, and the only way it’ll be won is by fighting for democracy.”
Dr. Carol Anderson recently wrote a piece for Oprah Daily on the historical and contemporary relationships between the Second Amendment, anti-Blackness, and formal slavery. The article, “The Second Amendment Enshrines Anti-Blackness, Argues Writer and Legal Scholar Carol Anderson,” draws heavily from Anderson’s most recent book, The Second: Race and Guns in an Unequal America(Bloomsbury, 2021). Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor, Chair of African American Studies, and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read an excerpt of the article below as well as the full piece here.
“We are, therefore, dealing with the consequences and horrific costs of embedding anti-Blackness into the Second Amendment of the Constitution. No one is safe. Not in our schools. Not in our neighborhood grocery stores. Not in our churches or synagogues or mosques. Not where we work. Not where we go to relax—at a nightclub, a concert, or a movie theater. Not even where we celebrate the founding of this nation.
“With 400 million guns in circulation, and no safety to be found, it is time to strip away the untouchable aura of the Second Amendment and recognize how sullied and dangerous it really is. America needs to give the Second Amendment a hard second look.“
Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, fresh from her confirmation as the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, recently completed her first official trip abroad in this role. Lipstadt travelled to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where she discussed how to combat anti-Jewish sentiment with leaders in government and civil society. Multiple news outlets covered Lipstadt’s trip. Find the articles below:
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African-American Studies, appeared on the PBS show Amanpour & Co. last month to discuss the significance of the Juneteenth emancipation holiday. The U.S. government recognized Juneteenth, which marks the day in 1865 that the last slaves in Galveston, Texas learned that they were free, as a federal holiday in 2021. Anderson is the author, most recently, of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Watch the interview with Anderson here: “The Significance of Juneteenth.”
Fresh from her recent installation as the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt recently participated in the American Jewish Committee’s 2022 Global Forum. Lipstadt sat for a conversation with Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s Coordinator for Combating Anti-Semitism and Fostering Jewish Life, as well as Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, the Europe Managing Director for the American Jewish Committee. The discussion centered on how governments can effectively combat antisemitism. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read/watch the discussion via the AJC Global Voice.
