Category / Faculty

by emoryhistorydept

Anderson Talks Democracy in America, Past and Present, for WaPo Live

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently a featured guest on The Washington Post Live with Post journalist Sarah Ellison. Framed by the theme “Democracy in America,” Anderson offers historical context and contemporary analysis of issues threatening the vitality of democracy in the U.S., ranging from polarization in Congress and popular mistrust in institutions to the dissemination of political disinformation. Anderson is the author, most recently, of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Watch the interview below or on YouTube: “Historian Carol Anderson on America’s democracy and the lessons of the past.”

by emoryhistorydept

Allitt Provides Context for Current Surge of Labor Strikes

Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, pictured with Emory alumna and trustee Susan Cahoon

Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, was recently quoted in an article in the New York Post about labor strikes in Hollywood, on car manufacturing plants, and beyond. An expert in the history of industrialization, Allitt offers historical context for the current surge of union organizing and work stoppages. He also comments on the relationship between labor, technological innovation, and prosperity. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece here: “What writers and auto workers strikes say about unions and innovation.”

“Professor Allitt empathizes with today’s workers, but with his historian’s eye sees a picture of broadly-shared progress, even on the labor front. ‘Every time one set of jobs has disappeared, new ones have appeared and in every generation more of the jobs have been relatively interesting, well paying, and fulfilling.'”

by emoryhistorydept

Klibanoff Helps Identify Two Victims of 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre

Professor Hank Klibanoff, Director of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently contributed to the identification of two of the at least nine unknown Black victims of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. The two victims, Stinson Ferguson, 25, and 13-year-old Marshall Carter, were among 25 Black Atlantans killed by a massive white mob in one of Georgia’s bloodiest, yet least remembered, outbursts of collective racial violence. The revelation coincided with the 117th anniversary of the massacre. Klibanoff and staff from the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project worked alongside the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society on the effort to identify the unknown victims. Read more about this project here:

by emoryhistorydept

Patchwork Freedoms wins James A. Rawley Prize

Congratulations to Dr. Adriana Chira, Associate Professor of History, whose book Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race Beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022) has won the American Historical Association’s Rawley Prize. Named for James A. Rawley, the Carl Adolph Happold Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, this prize recognizes outstanding historical writing that explores aspects of integration of Atlantic worlds before the 20th century. Published as part of Cambridge’s Afro-Latin America series, Patchwork Freedoms has already won two other awards: Honorable Mention, Best Book, Nineteenth Century Section, from the Latin American Studies Association, and the 2023 Elsa Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians.

by emoryhistorydept

LaChance Interviewed for One Year Podcast on Slate

Dr. Daniel LaChance, Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History, 2020-23, and Associate Professor, was recently interviewed on the Slate podcast One Year: 1955. The episode, “Siberia, USA,” focuses on “The Communist-hunting housewives who spawned a far-right conspiracy theory about an American gulag.” The episode features a discussion of Lucille Miller, the subject of LaChance’s forthcoming book, Mrs. Miller’s Constitution: Civil Liberties and the Radical Right in Cold War America.

by emoryhistorydept

Suddler Offers Context for Deion Sanders Success at Colorado

Dr. Carl Suddler, Associate Professor of History, was recently quoted in two news articles about Deion Sanders, the former NFL star who has had extraordinary success in his first year as the head coach of the University of Colorado at Boulder football team. An expert in U.S. and African-American as well as sport histories, Suddler offers a historically-informed analysis of Sanders’ meteoric rise as a head coach and its significance to Black Americans, in particular. Suddler also discusses Sanders’ ties to Atlanta, where he played for the Falcons from 1990-’93. Read the two articles quoting Suddler here:

by emoryhistorydept

Yannakakis to Serve as Visiting Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris

Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Professor of History, has been invited to serve as visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris. Founded in 1984, the EHESS occupies a unique and leading role in French intellectual life as well as global networks of scholarly exchange. Yannakakis will be in residence from November – December 2023. She is the author, most recently, of Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press, 2023).

by emoryhistorydept

Menashe Receives Preyer Award from American Society for Legal History

Dr. Tamar Menashe, the Jay and Leslie Cohen Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies, has received the 2023 Preyer Award from the American Society for Legal History. Named for distinguished historian of the law of early America Kathryn T. Preyer, the award provides an honorarium and travel expenses for early career scholars to present a paper at the Society’s annual meeting. Menashe will deliver her paper, “A Person of the Imperial Supreme Court: Jewish Litigation in Speyer and the Struggle to Belong,” as a Kathryn T. Preyer Scholar at the late October 2023 meeting in Philadelphia.

by emoryhistorydept

Chira Wins NEH Collaborative Grant

Congratulations to Dr. Adriana Chira, Associate Professor of History, on receiving a Collaborative Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the project “Value, Self-Worth, and the Market in the Black Spanish Caribbean in the Age of Slavery.” Dr. Pablo F. Gómez, Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Madison, is the co-leader of the project. The more than $170,000 award will support the preparation of a co-authored book on Black negotiation of bodily value in the Spanish Caribbean and its economic and political implications from 1680 to 1790. Chira’s first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022), recently received the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from Association for Caribbean Historians.

by emoryhistorydept

Lipstadt Addresses Antisemitism and Jewish Traditions in NY Times

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, recently published an op-ed in The New York Times. Titled “Want to Fight Antisemitism? Embrace Jewish Traditions,” the piece endorses combating antisemitism through an embrace of core tenets of Judaism itself, including (as Lipstadt writes) “its values, its moral teachings, its pursuit of justice.” Ambassador Lipstadt advances this argument in her role as the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to combat antisemitism and in the midst of a surge in antisemitic violence across the globe. Read an excerpt from Tthe New York Times article below, along with the full piece here.

“Combating antisemitism requires a shift in perspective, I explained. It must sprout from a positive place. We must know what we are protecting from assault. We must be motivated far more by our love for the insights, wisdom and joy embedded in Jewish culture than by the fight against those who harbor an insane hatred of it.”