Category / Faculty

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?“

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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.”

by emoryhistorydept

Julia Lopez Fuentes (PhD, ’20) Awarded Article Prize

Dr. Julia Lopez Fuentes, a 2020 graduate of the History doctoral program and upper school teacher at the National Cathedral School, was recently awarded the 2023 European Studies First Article Prize in the Social Sciences by the Council for European Studies at Columbia University. The article, “’A Forgetting for Everyone, by Everyone’? Spain’s Memory Laws and the Rise of the European Community of Memory, 1977–2007,” was published in The Journal of Modern History in 2022. Drs. Walter L. Adamson and Astrid M. Eckert advised Fuentes’s doctoral work, including a 2015 graduate paper in which she first conducted the research and analysis that would culminate in the 2022 article. Read the abstract of this impressive scholarly contribution below. Congratulations, Dr. Fuentes!

“Historians and other scholars of memory have worked extensively on European memory politics, especially around transnational issues such as the Holocaust, as well as on Spanish memory politics, most recently in light of the exhumation of former dictator Francisco Franco. Yet there has been little scholarship to date on how nationally specific incidents, such as the Spanish Civil War and Franco regime, fit into wider trans-European narratives. This article reveals the entanglements between these local and supranational developments by examining the evolution of Spain’s memory laws and discourse, from the 1977 Amnesty Law that followed the end of the Franco regime to the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, in relation to contemporaneous European memorialization patterns. It argues that the shift from a discourse of forgetting in the Amnesty Law to one of commemoration in the Law of Historical Memory is a response to the rise of a European culture of memorialization rather than reflecting an evolution in Spain’s memory regime. By analyzing the development, text, and application of these laws, along with the political and cultural debates surrounding them in Spain and throughout Europe, this article reveals how the 2007 Spanish Law of Historical Memory, despite appearing to espouse European discourses of memorialization and amends-making, perpetuates a system of disremembering that predates most contemporary European memory politics. Ultimately, the article argues that the Law of Historical Memory suppresses the voices of victims of the Franco regime in order to bolster a narrative of Spanish national unity and European belonging.”

by emoryhistorydept

Anderson Reflects on Jan 6 Anniversary and Democracy in US

Last month Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was invited to weigh in on the legacy of the Jan 6 insurrection for Minnesota Public Radio’s program “Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller.” Anderson was joined by two other prominent historians, Elizabeth Cobb (Texas A&M) and Eric Foner (Columbia University), in a conversation that sheds light on democracy in the US, past and present. Anderson’s numerous books include White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016) and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018). Listen to the full conversation: “Three historians and authors reflect on this American moment.”

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Anderson Maps Voter Intimidation Efforts in GA, Past and Present

Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently wrote an opinion piece in Democracy Docket, a news platform focused on voting rights and elections in the courts. Anderson’s article, “Intimidating Voters Is Nothing New in Georgia, It’s Just Easier Now,” outlines the range of voter intimidation efforts that took place in Georgia in the 2020 election and which have been made even easier through new laws in the lead up to the 2024 election. The article offers historical context, as well, as Anderson draws parallels to earlier eras of voter suppression. Read a quote from the piece below along with the full article.

“In December 2020, just weeks before a historic U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia, True the Vote, a Texas-based right-wing group, challenged the voter registration of more than 250,000 Georgians, ‘offered a $1 million bounty and recruited Navy SEALs to oversee polling places,’ hoping that enough Americans would be purged from the rolls less than a month before a key election that would decide control of the Senate.  

“This was not the first time that the organization pulled a stunt like this. True the Vote had already received brushback pitches from the Department of Justice and authorities in Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin for submitting unverifiable lists, demanding the removal of voters even though a federal election loomed and intimidating voters. Indeed, True the Vote suggested that intimidation was key to its strategy. Earlier it had told its volunteers that the goal was to give voters a feeling ‘like driving and seeing the police following you.’ In short, to replicate the terror of ‘Voting while Black.'”

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Lowery’s New Film ‘Lumbeeland’ Explores Impact of Drug Trade on Lumbee Communities


Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, has written and produced a new short film, titled Lumbeeland. With an all-Native crew and cast (the first film written, produced, and starring members of the Lumbee tribe), Lumbeeland explores the impact of the drug trade on Lumbee communities in Lowery’s birthplace of Robeson county, North Carolina. The film will premiere at the Lumbee Film Festival in July 2024, and the producers are in the midst of a fundraising campaign to support its release to wider audiences. Read a great piece about the origins and aims of the films here, and watch the trailer below.

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Anderson Addresses More Challenges to Voting Rights Act on MSNBC

Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently appeared on MSNBC to discuss a new challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The eighth circuit federal appeals court overturned Section 2 of the Act, which gives private citizens the right to sue in the name of fair voting rights. Anderson appeared alongside Judith Browne Dianis, Executive Director of the Advancement Project. Anderson is the author of numerous books, including One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018). Watch the full MSNBC interview with host Charles Coleman: “New attack on Voting Rights Act threatens Black vote protections: ‘It’s a problem’.“

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Klibanoff Pens Piece on Rosalynn Carter and Susan Ford Bales for AJC


Professor Hank Klibanoff, a Professor of Journalism and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published an article in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Titled, “When Rosalynn Carter tapped Gerald Ford’s daughter to serve on mental health advisory board,” the piece describes how the selection of Susan Ford Bales helped to maintain Carter’s connection to longtime friend Betty Ford. Rosalynn Carter passed away on November 19, 2023. She and her husband, former president Jimmy Carter, had strong ties to Emory. Read the full AJC article by Professor Klibanoff.