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Emory Launches First Annual Brazil Week, September 19-23

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On September 19, 2016, Emory will inaugurate the first annual Brazil Week, a celebration of the university’s engagement with Brazil. The multidisciplinary series of activities, organized by Emory’s Brazil Initiative through the Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning, will involve History faculty and students from Emory and elsewhere. History Department faculty within the Brazil Initiative include Dr. Jeffrey Lesser (Chair and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History) and Dr. Thomas D. Rogers (Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History). Check out a schedule of events below, read more about the Brazil initiative, and visit this page to register for the week’s events.

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Placing Time: The Power of Mapping Technology for Historical Analysis
Tuesday, September 20
4:00-5:00pm
Oxford Road Building Auditorium

Emory professor Michael Page will present Atlanta Explorer, a project dedicated to building and disseminating geographical datasets and tools for exploring Atlanta’s history. Professor Luís Ferla of Federal University of São Paulo will describe the work of Hímaco: History, Maps, Computers, a collaborative laboratory of historians, geographers, and computer scientists exploring the spatial history of São Paulo. This panel, moderated by Professor Michael Elliott, Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences, features the current work of these partners in a new collaboration on Brazilian urban studies.

Zika: A Brazilian Perspective on A Global Challenge
Wednesday, September 21
4:00-5:30pm, followed by a casual reception
Atwood Hall 360
(New Chemistry Building)

Zika virus’ arrival in Brazil and the rest of the world unleashed a storm of public health challenges and media attention. Brazil has been at the forefront of the epidemic and the efforts to address it, and transmission is now ongoing in many areas in the Americas, including Florida and Puerto Rico in the U.S. Dr. Mariana Kikuti, DVM, PhD Candidate, Federal University of Bahia; Dr. Uriel Kitron, Goodrich C. White Professor of Environmental Sciences, Emory University; Dr. Igor Paploski, DVM, PhD Candidate, Federal University of Bahia; and Dr. Lincoln Suesdek, Researcher at Scientific Council of Butantan Institute, Brazil, will provide a brief overview of Zika and its mosquito vector – Aedes aegypti, present findings from their studies in the Brazilian cities of São Paulo and Salvador, and answer questions from the audience.

Bate-Papo: Portuguese Conversational Hour
Friday, September 23
1:00-2:30pm
Great Room, Longstreet-Means Hall

Come join us for pizza and conversations in Portuguese with students, faculty, and staff from across the university and broader community.

Additional cultural events will be organized throughout the week by the Brazilian Student Association (BRASA), including Capoeira Performance/Workshop on Monday, September 19 at 7:30 pm in the Woodruff P.E. Center and a Samba performance. Visit here for updates and details.

 

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Dr. Carol Anderson at the AJC Decatur Book Festival

Professor Carol Anderson recently spoke with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist Rosalind Bentley in advance of her appearance at the AJC Decatur  Book Festival. Anderson puts recent police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement in historical context, and the interview includes commentary about her new book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016). Check out a clip below and read the full interview here.

“If you only define status as, ‘I got mine,’ and you define what this nation has to offer as a zero-sum game — meaning you can only get something at my expense — then there’s fear. Exclusivity is shortsighted and it will destroy this nation.”

 

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Professor Deborah Lipstadt in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Deborah Lipstadt, associated faculty of the History Department and Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, was recently featured in an op-ed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Bert Roughton. Roughton discusses a recent libel trial in England involving Lipstadt, who was charged to prove herself innocent of libel against David Irving. Irving has authored works that deny the Holocaust. View an excerpt below or check out the full article here.

“Lipstadt recalls the trial as a test of the place facts hold in understanding our history. ‘The trial was about the difference between fact and opinion — truth and lies,’ she said in an email. ‘Our objective was to demonstrate to the court not what happened in the Holocaust — though we did end up doing that as a byproduct — but prove that what deniers such as Irving say is based on lies and distortions of evidence.

‘Of course, another important element was that the ‘opinions’ held by deniers such as Irving are laced with anti-semitism, racism, and love of Nazism,’ she wrote. ‘More than laced with, they are built on the foundation stone of those hatreds.”

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Joseph Crespino in The New York Times: “Why Hillary Clinton Might Win Georgia”

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History, published an op-ed in The New York Times on August 22nd. In “Why Hilary Clinton Might Win Georgia,” Crespino puts the 2016 presidential contest in the context of past Republican and Democratic campaigns to re/take the South. Crespino asserts that the shading purple of states like Georgia and South Carolina “has less to do with the future than the past, and both parties run a risk in misreading it. Mr. Trump’s racially charged hard-right campaign reveals a fault line in Republican politics that dates from the very beginning of G.O.P. ascendancy in the South.” Read an excerpt below and check out the full article.

“Whether or not Republicans hold on to Georgia and South Carolina this year, the lessons they are likely to take away are predictable. Democrats will assume that these states, like Virginia and North Carolina, are part of a long-term liberal trend and push traditional liberal ideas harder in future elections. Republicans will most likely write off Mr. Trump as a one-time phenomenon and not do anything. In doing so, both parties will ignore lessons from the history of the Southern conservative majority.

“What might be happening instead is something new in the South: true two-party politics, in which an urban liberal-moderate Democratic Party fights for votes in the increasingly multiethnic metropolitan South against an increasingly rural, nationalistic Republican Party. If that happens, it will transform not only the politics of the American South, but those of America itself.”

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Professor Tonio Andrade Wins Article Prize from the Society for Medieval Military History

Dr. Tonio Andrade was awarded the Gillingham Prize for his article “Late Medieval Divergences:  Comparative Perspectives on Early Gunpowder Warfare in Europe and China.” Andrade’s article appeared in the Journal of Medieval Military History in 2014. The Gillingham Prize is given annually by the Society for Medieval Military History to the best article by a member to appear in the preceding issue of the Journal of Medieval Military History.

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Professor Tonio Andrade Weighs in on Tensions in South China Sea in `The Washington Post`

Professor Tonio Andrade recently authored an opinion piece for The Washington Post examining brewing tensions in the South China Sea. Andrade, who published The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History with Princeton this year, urges U.S. policy makers to reckon with the histories of Chinese expansionism in the Eastern Hemisphere despite past and present claims otherwise. Check out the excerpt below and read the full article, “For U.S. leaders, confronting China is a dangerous game,” here.

What’s intriguing is that the timing of these bouts of expansive warfare was similar: They each occurred about 40 or 50 years after the dynasty was founded, after domestic control had been consolidated. And why did the Ming and Qing dynasties engage in such expansion after achieving domestic consolidation? In a word, security. In each case, leaders justified their military action with reference to China’s historic vulnerability. Only by achieving unquestioned preeminence in its hemisphere — or, as Chinese leaders put it, in the earthly realm — could China guarantee safety and security for its people. Expansion was meant to foster peace.

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Carol Anderson’s “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide” Reviewed in “The New York Times”

Carol Anderson‘s The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2014) was recently reviewed by Jesse McCarthy in The New York Times. McCarthy’s review, titled “Why Are Whites So Angry,” appraised Anderson’s work as an “extraordinarily timely and urgent call to confront the legacy of structural racism bequeathed by white anger and resentment, and to show its continuing threat to the promise of American democracy.” Professor Anderson is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies. Read the full review here.

Media of White Rage

 

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Collaboration between Professor Mark Ravina and History Major TJ Greer Featured on ‘Digital Humanities Now’

Over the last year Dr. Mark Ravina and history major TJ Greer have collaborated on a digital humanities project examining the rhetoric of student activism and university administration responses through text mining. The project was recently profiled by the editors of the website Digital Humanities Now, where the study’s findings will appear in a series of blog posts. Read an excerpt from their first post below (“Mining the Movement: Some DH perspectives on student activism”) and check out the full run here.

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This first blog reflects our first preliminary results, but even at this early stage we feel comfortable with two declarations: one empirical and one political. The empirical observation is that university administrations are largely talking past students, employing a radically different vocabulary than that of student demands. Our political observation is that universities need to address student demands seriously and directly, even if that means admitting that some problems are deeply structural and that solutions will require decades rather than months or years.

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Dr. Brian Vick’s New Book Selected for Roundtable Review on H-Diplo

Professor Brian Vick, Associate Professor of History, published The Congress of Vienna, Power and Politics after Napoleon with Harvard University Press in 2014. The internet network H-Diplo recently selected Vick’s monograph for a multi-review roundtable and a response from the author. One of the reviewers, Jonathan Sperber (University of Missouri), praises Vick’s extensive use of primary sources and original approach. Sperber asserts that The Congress of Vienna for offers “a striking reinterpretation of the Congress, the practice of diplomacy and the political culture of post-Napoleonic Europe, which substantially enhances our understanding of the era while opening new possibilities for historical investigation and provoking scholarly debate.” Read the full set of reviews and Vick’s response here.

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Roark Prize, Endowed by Young Alumni, Established to Support Undergraduate Research

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Retiring Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History, Dr. Jim Roark, will be honored with a scholarship for undergraduate research bearing his name. The Roark Prize will support rising seniors in the History Department pursuing research in the United States relating to their honors thesis. The idea for the prize originated with two former history students, Ben Leiner (’14) and Naveed Amalfard (’14), who counted Roark as an inspiring mentor and professor. Read the Emory News Center’s full report on the prize here.