Category / Faculty

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Suh Recognized with Hardman Award for Excellence in Service to the Emory Community

Congratulations to Dr. Chris Suh, Assistant Professor, on receiving the 2020 Laura Jones Hardman Award for Excellence in Service to the Emory Community at the Emory Crystal Apple Awards ceremony earlier this semester. The Crystal Apple Awards honor faculty members who go above and beyond in their search for knowledge and involvement in the Emory community. The awards are sponsored by the Residence Hall Association. Each year, students are asked to nominate their professors based on select criteria.

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Eckert Wins Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award

Congratulations to Dr. Astrid M. Eckert, Associate Professor of History, on being awarded the Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. The award is presented annually to faculty members in each of the four undergraduate schools in recognition of a record of excellence in undergraduate teaching. The award was established by Emory Williams, a 1932 Emory College alumnus and long-time trustee. Eckert is one of only six faculty on campus to receive the award this year. Read more about the Undergraduate Teaching Award, including past recipients.

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Yannakakis and Premo Discuss Law, its Spaces, and its Practitioners in Colonial Mexico and Peru

Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Associate Professor of History, recently published a conversation about law in colonial Latin America with Dr. Bianca Premo, Professor of History at Florida International University. Their piece is published as a part of the History and the Law Project within the Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas Programme. The conversation includes discussion of Yannakakis’s digital project, “Power of Attorney,” which we featured in 2018: “Recent Faculty Publications: Q & A with Yanna Yannakakis about ‘Power of Attorney.’”

Read the piece by Yannakakis and Premo here: “On not going to court in colonial Spanish America: A conversation between Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis.”

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Suddler Discusses ‘The Last Dance’ and McDaniels’ Passing on ‘The Black Athlete’ Podcast

Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor of History, recently appeared on The Black Athlete podcast. In this episode, Dr. Suddler joins a conversation about the first episodes of The Last Dance, a 2020 American sports documentary miniseries focusing on the 1997–98 Chicago Bulls. Suddler also addresses the passing of his friend, mentor, and sports historian Dr. Pellom McDaniels, III. Listen to the episode on SoundCloud.

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History Department Joins Emory Community in Mourning Sudden Passing of Dr. Pellom McDaniels, III

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The History Department mourns the loss of an extraordinary human being. Our friend and colleague Dr. Pellom McDaniels III, curator of African American Collections in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, passed away unexpectedly in his home this past Sunday. Pellom enriched the life of every person who knew him. Our History students benefited enormously from his knowledge and kindness. He will be so greatly missed! Read more about McDaniels life and career on the Emory Scholar Blogs.

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Strocchia’s FYS, ‘Epidemics in History,’ Brings Historical Insights to Unfolding Pandemic

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, is teaching a first-year seminar titled “Epidemics in History” this spring. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the course far more timely than she or the students anticipated. The Emory News Center featured “Epidemics in History” among Emory courses where professors and students are using the pandemic as a learning opportunity. Read about all of those courses in their article, “COVID-19 in Class.” Strocchia also offered comments on her original idea for the class and how she modified it in order to investigate this historical moment in real time. Read her comments below.

My freshman seminar this semester, “Epidemics in History,” was not designed to coincide with a global pandemic. I did plan to end the course with a study of the 1918 influenza epidemic after examining the Black Death and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks. Our goal was to explore the historical and biological effects of urbanization, environmental change, and the human connectivity resulting from faster modes of transportation. But I also wanted to raise issues of preparedness with my students, many of who planned careers in medicine and science. It seemed oddly serendipitous that the Wuhan outbreak of coronavirus hit the headlines just as spring semester started. At our first class meeting in January, we decided that tracking its progression would make a good class project. Relying on trusted news outlets, we learned the value of social distancing, good hand hygiene, and flattening the curve. Week by week, the news grew more startling but still seemed far from home. By the time spring break arrived, though, COVID-19 already had an official name and the world was on the verge of pandemic. We’ve since modified our syllabus to make direct comparisons between the experiences of 1918 and our own day, looking at public health policies, frontline healers, issues of fear and resilience. It’s been a rewarding but sobering experience—one that shows there’s much to be learned about health and society from studying the past.

– Sharon Strocchia

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Dr. Polly J. Price, Associated Faculty in History, Discusses Jurisdiction and COVID-19 on CNN

Dr. Polly J. Price is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Professor of Global Health, and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Price recently contributed to a CNN segment with host Michael A. Smerconish about jurisdiction in the context of stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures intended to curb the spread of COVID-19. View the segment here: “Why is there no national lockdown?”

Price is a public health law scholar as well as a legal historian and citizenship and immigration law expert. Her current book project, Plagues in the Nation (forthcoming from Beacon Press), examines how epidemics have shaped US law and continue to pose challenges for disease control in democratic societies. In recent weeks Price has also authored two pieces for The Atlantic: “A Coronavirus Quarantine in America Could Be a Giant Legal Mess” and “How a Fragmented Country Fights a Pandemic.”

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Carol Anderson on COVID-19 and Voter Suppression in ‘Time’

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Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has written an article in Time titled  “Republicans Could Use the Coronavirus to Suppress Votes Across the Country. This Week We Got a Preview.” Anderson’s piece examines how stay-at-home orders prompted by COVID-19 could lead to the disenfranchisement of voters in primary elections and may portend the same for the general election in November. Anderson is the author, most recently, of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was published by Bloomsbury and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in Non-fiction and a National Book Award Longlist finalist in Non-fiction.

 

 

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Ashley Parcells (PhD, ’18) Receives NEH Summer Stipend

Dr. Ashley Parcells, Assistant Professor of History at Jacksonville State University, has received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The support will allow Parcells to complete interviews and two chapters for a book on apartheid and sovereignty in KwaZulu, South Africa. Her project is titled “Ethnicity, State-Building, and the Making of Apartheid, ca. 1951 to 1994.” Parcells completed her doctorate in 2018, with Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor and Director of the Institute of African Studies, serving as her primary dissertation adviser.