Category / Faculty

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Lipstadt Discusses Anti-Semitism on ABC National Radio

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and associated faculty in the History Department, was a recent guest on Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National program. Lipstadt discusses anti-Semitism and the far right in the interview with host Phillip Adams. Read a brief summary of the interview below and listen to the full segment here.

The January insurrection in Washington, aimed at the heart of American democracy, was not only a demonstration of right wing anger and power. Prominent Jewish historian, Deborah Lipstadt, argues that antisemitism is the foundation stone of ‘white power’ and the ‘white nationalist agenda’, that allows them to then take part in attacking, deriding and demeaning people of colour.

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Emory News Center Features Montalvo’s Course, “Slavery and the Archive”

The Emory News Center recently wrote a feature story about Dr. Maria R. Montalvo‘s spring 2021 course, “Slavery and the Archive.” The course involved undergraduates in conducting original archival research on the lives of enslaved people, including in Emory’s extensive collections in African American history in the Woodruff Library and Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library. Dr. Erica Bruchko, a 2016 graduate of the History doctoral program and African American Studies and U.S. History Librarian at the Woodruff library, supported the students’ research. Dr. Montalvo is an Assistant Professor and in her second year at Emory. Read a quote from the Emory News Center article below along with the full piece: “History course uncovers ‘archival silences’ of enslaved people.”

“My goal is not to have them all become historians,” Montalvo says. “My goal is to help them understand how to read, learn and question effectively enough to become the best of anything they want to be.”

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Students in Miller’s “The History of Skiing and Snowsports” Launch Website

This spring Dr. Judith A. Miller, Associate Professor of History, taught a new course, “The History of Skiing and Snowsports.” Explaining the genesis of the course, Miller said, “I wished to create a course that took the history of skiing and snowsports seriously, that is, a course that reflected the questions that historians have.” The students in this course have just published their final projects on a website, which was produced in collaboration with Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS). Browse the students’ projects on the new website, and read more about the course via the description below.

This new course explores the history of snow sports, especially skiing, from the 18th century to today. We have many topics and Zoom guests lined up. This class is not only for history majors or skiers, but also for business students, and anyone interested in environmental history, sports history, and the history of gender and race. The class will look at the military uses of skiing in World War II, the expansion of leisure sports after 1960, the development of ski schools, history of ski patrols, lift technology, emerging environmental issues, snow science, avalanche control, the history of the land and the indigenous peoples, race and inclusivity in winter sports, the transformation of ski equipment, snow fashions, and the business of ski resorts. Students who have never taken a history course and first-year students are welcome. Each student will do a short final research project. Check out the promotional video on @emoryhistory Instagram during the enrollment period. As American Historical Association Executive Director Jim Grossman says, “Everything has a history.” Skiing and snow sports have a fascinating histories.

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Anderson Draws Parallels to Jim Crow Era in CNN Articles on Voter Suppression

Dr. Carol Anderson was quoted in two recent CNN articles produced as part of a series on voter suppression. The articles examine legislation in multiple states, including Georgia, that observers see as meaningfully restricting voting access and curbing voters’ rights. Anderson explains how this legislation echoes voter suppression tactics from the Jim Crow era.

Dr. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Department Chair, and Associated Faculty in the History Department. She is the author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018). Read an excerpt from Anderson’s contribution to the first CNN article below, along with the full versions of each: “Republican state lawmakers look to empower partisan poll watchers, setting off alarms about potential voter intimidation” and “A short history of the long conservative assault on Black voting power.”

“Carol Anderson, an historian and professor of African American Studies at Emory University, said the new proposals build on a history of voter intimidation that long has targeted people of color. ‘What’s built into this is the inequality of the system itself,’ she said. ‘You know that somebody who is Black or Hispanic will not be able to go up into an all-White precinct and start challenging those voters without having a massive law-enforcement response.’ She called the wave of new laws ‘infuriating.’ ‘It’s infuriating because we’ve done this dance before,’ Anderson said. ‘We know what a Jim Crow democracy looks like and the damage it does to the United States of America and to its people.'”

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History Dept. Students and Faculty Receive Grants from Halle Institute

Emory’s Halle Institute for Global Research has awarded multiple undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members from the History Department with research funding throughout the 2020-’21 academic year. Directed by Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, the Halle Institute supports and promotes global research opportunities for faculty, students, and visiting scholars throughout all of Emory’s schools. See the History Department’s recipients and their funded projects below.

Rethinking Global Inequalities (with Goizueta Business and Society Institute)

Michelle Armstrong-Partida – “Singlewomen: Enslaved and Free in the Late Medieval Mediterranean”

Halle-CFDE Global Atlanta Innovative Teaching (GAIT) Grants

Adriana Chira – “Human Trafficking in World History”

URC-Halle International Research Awards in partnership with the University Research Council (URC)

Astrid M. Eckert – “Germany and the Global Commons: Environment, Diplomacy, and the Market”

Graduate Global Research Fellows

Georgia Brunner – Rwanda/Italy/Belgium      

Undergraduate Global Research Fellows

Bronwen Boyd – “The Signares of Senegambia: Slavery, “Progress,” and the French Colonial Project in the Nineteenth Century,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History, French Studies

Ellie Coe – “Unlikely Friendships: The Little-Known Meetings of Cosmonauts and Astronauts in the Early Space Age,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History, Russian and East European Studies

Alex Levine – “Dueling Dragons: Examining Welsh National Identity Through Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century British Imperial Involvement in China,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History

Annie Li – “A Comparative History of the Activism of Chinese American Churches and Taiwanese Churches,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History, Sociology

Willie Lieberman – “English Femininity in Purcell’s Operas,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History

Julien Nathan – “Who is the Nation: Analyzing the Relationship Between Gastarbeiter and the New Left Student Movement, 1960-1973,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History

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Anderson Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Department Chair, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Anderson was one of five Emory faculty elected to the American Academy this year, the highest number for a single year in the university’s history. Read the Emory News Center’s summary of Anderson’s work below, along with their article about all five newly-elected Emory faculty. Also see the American Academy’s press release to read about the entire cohort of 252 faculty members elected this year.

Anderson is a nationally recognized historian, educator and author whose research and teaching focus on the ways that policy is made and unmade, how racial inequality and racism affect that process and outcome, and how those who have taken the brunt of those laws, executive orders and directives have worked to shape, counter, undermine, reframe, and, when necessary, dismantle the legal and political edifice used to limit their rights and humanity.

Anderson is the author of “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy,” which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in nonfiction. Her other books include “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide,” a New York Times bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016 and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner; “Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955,” and “Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960.”

Anderson is the recipient of grants and fellowships sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She was awarded a 2018 fellowship in Constitutional Studies by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Her work as a public scholar includes serving on working groups dealing with race, minority rights and criminal justice at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, the United Nations, and as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. She also is on the advisory board of Partners for Dignity and Human Rights.

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Smith Publishes Review Essay in ‘Southern Spaces’

Dr. Kylie M. Smith, Associate Professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has published a review essay in the Emory-headquartered journal Southern Spaces. The essay, “Psychiatry in the Wake: Racism and the Asylumed South,” centers on two recent publications: Mab Segrest’s Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum (The New Press, 2020) and Wendy Gonaver’s The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880 (UNC Press, 2019).

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Montalvo Publishes Chapter in ‘Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century’

Dr. Maria R. Montalvo, Assistant Professor of History, published a chapter in the recently-released edited collection Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century (LSU Press, 2021). Montalvo’s chapter, “Bernard Kendig: Orchestrating Fraud in the Market and the Courtroom,” investigates the deceptive and violent business dealings of a New Orleans trader in enslaved people. Montalvo’s work centers on histories of slavery, capitalism, and the law in the nineteenth-century United States.

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Lesser to Present Opening Lecture at Federal University of Paraná

Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Reserch, will deliver the opening lecture for the history graduate program at the Federal University of Paraná. Lesser’s lecture, titled “Structural Health: Immigrants, the State and Urban Geography in São Paulo, 1870-2020,” draws from his research based in the Bom Retiro neighborhood of the city of São Paulo. The lecture will be livestreamed on YouTube on April 28 at 4pm EDT.

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Crespino Discusses the Future of the Filibuster on “Political Rewind”

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor and Department Chair, was recently a guest on the Georgia Public Broadcasting show “Political Rewind.” The episode focused on the role of the filibuster in creating deadlock in the U.S. Senate. Crespino was a panelist alongside former U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, Steven Dennis (Congressional Reporter, Bloomberg News), and Tamar Hallerman (Senior Reporter, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Listen to the show at the following link: “Political Rewind: In Deadlocked Senate, Some Question If It Is Time To End The Filibuster.”