Doctoral student Alejandro Guardado won the Albert J. Beveridge grant from the American Historical Association for his research project, “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn, 1968–2000.” Guardado’s dissertation centers on Self Determination Movements in Zapotec and Mixe communities in the Sierra Norte of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. He analyzes how Indigenous intellectuals and activists developed networks with micro-regional political coalitions, anthropologists, liberation theologians, and NGOs as a means of renegotiating their relationship to the Mexican government and market forces.
The Beveridge grants support research in the history of the Western Hemisphere, and Guardado was among just 15 graduate students nationwide selected for the prize. Dr. Yanna Yannakis, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Department Chair, serves as Guardado’s dissertation advisor.
In the summer of 2025, Emory College senior Lucia Alexeyev conducted research about the relationship between U.S. Naval occupation and residents’ health and access to healthcare on the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico. Alexeyev’s project, titled “Military Occupation and Changing Healthcare Landscapes: Vieques and the U.S. Navy, 1941-2003,” was funded by the History Department’s Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad.
Alexeyev is a History major and Global Health, Culture and Society minor. Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, serves as her thesis adviser. Read an excerpt from the Nueve Millones piece below and find the full article here.
“Even with how politics has changed in the EPA, Estrada Martinez remains hopeful for the study’s completion. She’s inspired by the Viequense community’s 63-year struggle to remove the Navy from the island, plus an additional 20-year battle to obtain funding for VASAC in the first place. ‘This is just a rock on the road, and we will figure out together how to get rid of it and move forward, right?‘”
Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, published Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil with Duke University Press in the spring of 2025. Editora UNESP recently released the Portuguese-language version, Viver e morrer em São Paulo: Imigração, saúde e infraestrutura urbana (século XIX até o presente). Focused on São Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood, Living and Dying examines competing visions of well-being in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials. Jerry Dávila, who holds the Jorge Paulo Lemann Chair in Brazilian History at the University of Illinois, describes Lesser’s book as “methodologically innovative, conceptually powerful, and engagingly written.” Both the English-language and Portuguese-language versions will have open access editions thanks to a tome (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Emory University.
In the Q&A below, Dr. Lesser gives us a glimpse into the making of the monograph as part of the History Department’s New Books series.
Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.
Living and Dying was conceived about a decade ago during a very boring meeting of department chairs and administrators. Fortunately, I was sitting in the back of the room with the bad kids, including Uriel Kitron, at the time chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences. As we discussed our mutual research interests in Brazil, we began to think of a project on the relation between immigration and health. It did not take long for us to jointly teach an interdisciplinary seminar on the topic and arrange a grant to bring some students in that class to Brazil. Starting about 5 years ago, I was able to arrange regular funding for what became the Lesser Research Collective, an interdisciplinary group of students from Emory and UNIFESP in São Paulo. While we all work in the São Paulo neighborhood of Bom Retiro, on questions related broadly to health, we do so via individual projects and then we meet weekly to share our research.
What was the research process like?
Living and Dying reflects the many approaches that I use to generate and analyze data. Like many in the humanities, I spent most of my career thinking of myself as a solitary researcher even while acknowledging the help of archivists, librarians, and students. For this project, however, I worked with three interconnected teams whose data, ideas, and conclusions influence every sentence of this book. The research is informed by disciplines including history, cultural studies, public health, anthropology, geography, and sociology.
I used a variety of historical and contemporary sources, including archives, observation, oral histories, cartography, digital map creation, photographic exhibits, and participation in city-sponsored health programs. Much of the material was found in the archives of the Emílio Ribas Public Health Museum, situated in the building that had been São Paulo’s Central Disinfectory, and the archival and historical space became an actor in the interpretation of some of the documents.
I used the Pauliceia 2.0 Historical Geographic Information Systems Platform to link quantitative data (e.g., demography, infrastructure planning, health outcomes, and socioenvironmental challenges) to the built environment, especially in order to see continuities in spatial patterns over time. I often matched the quantitative data with blueprints, architects’ notes, street notes, and press reports to map contemporary human flows through and around the buildings, which I then compared with photographs and etchings from earlier periods. My own observations and oral histories emerged from multiple years embedded in a primary care team at the Bom Retiro Public Health Clinic.
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
I loved writing “Unliving Rats and Undead Immigrants” because it gave me a chance to treat zombies and ghosts as serious historical actors. The chapter analyzes why public health officials targeted Bom Retiro and its residents during the turn-of-the-century bubonic plague and 1918 influenza outbreaks. I show how the two epidemics led to similar discourses from health officials, often targeting immigrants. The immigrant working classes responded to the two events in similar ways as well, ranging from using popular medicinal practices for care and cure, to rising from the dead to wander to and from Bom Retiro. The chapter also analyzes how a public health campaign to buy rats during the late 19th century Bubonic Flu outbreak led to surprising (from the perspective of officials) responses from the public, like breeding rats or collecting them outside of the city and then bringing them to the Ministry of Health for sale.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda at this point in time?
My beloved advisor and mentor, the later Warren Dean, always argued that we should try to change our research agenda after each book. While in some ways I have rejected his advice (I am broadly interested in Brazil, ethnicity, and national identity) I have taken to heart his broad position, writing about topics as different as armed guerilla organizations, ethnic militancy, and public health. One idea I have for next book is to write the history of modern Brazil via the story of the Corinthians football team (the greatest in the universe!), which was founded in Bom Retiro by English railroad workers in the early twentieth century and whose captain, Socrates, would lead a movement called Corinthian democracy, against the dictatorship in the 1970s.
Doctoral student Ursula Rall has won a fellowship for at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is working on her dissertation, entitled “Forging Inter-Urban Communities: Spatial Mobilities and Social Networks of Women of African Descent in New Spain, 1580-1740.” Drawing on research in Spain and Mexico, the project explores how the social networks that Black women formed across urban centers were key to the socioeconomic mobility of the Black Mexican population during the seventeenth century. She argues that Afro-descended women had a sense of a shared racialized and gendered community, forming close ties and financial networks that improved their social and material lives.
Rall’s research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Grant, the American Historical Association, the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, the Conference on Latin American History, and Emory University’s Halle Institute for Global Research. Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Professor and Department Chair, is Rall’s faculty advisor.
Dr. Adriana Chira, Associate Professor of Atlantic World History, has been named Winship Distinguished Professor of History (effective September 1, 2025). Chira’s research and teaching specializations include: Atlantic history; Cuba in world history; race; slavery and the law; land tenure and property; and post-emancipation. This prestigious appointment recognizes Chira’s scholarly eminence and contributions to Emory’s mission.
Chira’s first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantation (Cambridge University Press, Afro-Latin America Series, 2022), focuses on enslaved and free Afro-descendants’ efforts to own landed property and to attain free legal status through claims to ownership filed inside first instance and appellate courts in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The book traces the political implications of these processes, arguing for a history of emancipation that pays attention to vernacular legalism and modes of claiming property. The project is based on extensive archival research within Cuba (in Havana and Santiago de Cuba) and Spain.
Patchwork Freedoms received the Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic World History from the American Historical Association, the Peter Gonville Stein Prize for best book in non-US legal history from the American Society for Legal History, and the Elsa Goveia Prize for excellence in Caribbean history from the Association of Caribbean Historians. It has also received honorable mentions from the Latin American Studies Association (the Nineteenth Century Section) and from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Section of the Southern Historical Association.
Chira has also authored multiple acclaimed scholarly articles, including:
“Freedom with Local Bonds: Custom and Manumission in the Age of Emancipation,” The American Historical Review 126.3 (September), 949-977
“Ampliando los significados de sevicia: Los reclamos de protección corporal de los esclavos en la Cuba del siglo XIX,” Páginas: Revista Digital de la Escuela de Historia de la Universidad de Rosario (Argentina) no. 33 (Sept./Oct.): https://revistapaginas.unr.edu.ar/index.php/RevPaginas/article/view/546
“Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817-1868,” Law and History Review 36.1 (winter), 1-33.
Chira teaches a range of thematic and placed-based courses, from “Human Trafficking in World History” to “History Lab: Puerto Rico.” She also created an Emory study abroad program in Cuba, which focuses on questions of food sovereignty and environmental history, that usually takes place during the Maymester semester.
Students and faculty on Cuba study abroad trip, 2024
Chira’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by residential fellowships at Yale University (at the Agrarian Studies Center) and at Harvard University (with the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History).
Jessica Alvarez Starr, a first-year PhD student, will be serving as an intern with the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration (PRAC) Summer 2025 Graduate Student Internship Program. As part of this 8-week program, Jessica will gain valuable exposure to collections in the Archivo General de Puerto Rico (AGPR) and the University of Puerto Rico’s Colección Puertorriqueña (CPR). Jessica will work alongside archivists to aid in organizing, transcribing, and digitizing efforts for the AGPR while developing their own research project on enslavement and emancipation practices in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. As an intern, Jessica will receive a stipend to cover travel and living costs for their work in San Juan. They are grateful for the opportunity to conduct archival research, gain preservation skills, and develop connections with scholars to advance their studies. Read more information about the PRAC internship. Their dissertation, tentatively titled “Revolutionary Rhetoric: Antislavery and Anticolonial Alliances in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” is advised by Drs. Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis.
In the summer of 2024, History PhD student Ashley Tan received funding from Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies to conduct research on Jewish communities in East and Southeast Asia. He wrote a reflection on his summer experience, which includes a fascinating discussion of his search for a centuries-old Kaifeng Jewish community, in a piece for the Tam Institute’s website.
In parallel to his history coursework, Tan is working towards a Jewish Studies Graduate Certificate. He is also a Brickman-Levin Fellow of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Young NUS Fellow of the National University of Singapore, and a Yenching Scholar of the Yenching Academy of Peking University. Tonio Andrade, Professor of History, serves as Tan’s advisor.
Read an excerpt from the Tam Institute piece below along with the full reflection.
“With the help from the Tam Institute’s research grants, I have had the chance to visit and conduct research on a number of different Jewish communities in East and Southeast Asia. The community that I will be focusing on in this article is one that is relatively more well-known but has largely faded into obscurity in recent years: the Kaifeng Jews. Although I have seen mentions of this community in passing when I read scholarship about Jewish history or when I visited different Jewish museums, detailed information about this community, especially regarding its recent history, is quite scanty. This puzzled me as the Kaifeng Jewish community is one of the oldest Jewish communities in Asia, dating back at least to the Song dynasty that existed around 1000 years ago when Kaifeng was the imperial capital, so I knew I had to go see it for myself.“
The Emory History Department is excited to welcome six new doctoral students to the department in the fall 2024 semester. The students’ specializations encompass – and compellingly transcend – an array of geographic, thematic, and chronological borders. Read abridged profiles of the new graduate cohort below and follow the links to read their full biographies on the History Department website.
Jessica Alvarez Starr received her B.A. (Spanish and History) and M.A. (Latin American Studies) from the University of Florida. Her undergraduate and master’s research focused on antislavery and anticolonial activism in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, topics that she plans to expand upon for her dissertation. Her graduate work will be advised by Drs. Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis.
Becca de los Santos received her B.A. (French and History) from Stanford University. As an undergraduate she worked on the Senegal Liberations Project and conducted research in France and Senegal for her prize-winning honors thesis. Her graduate research interests include slavery, abolition, and emancipatory trajectories in the nineteenth-century French Empire, especially Senegal, Réunion, French Guiana, and Guadeloupe. Drs. Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais will advise her work.
Minju Kang received her B.A. from Ajou University and M.A. Seoul National University. Her master’s work focused on early modern Japan, particularly the impact of shogunate and domain policies on a small city in the Kantō region. Kang’s dissertation is tentatively titled “State Power and Local Society: Shogunate-Domain Relations in Japan’s Transition from the Early Modern to the Modern Era.” Drs. Laura Nenzi and Tonio Andrade will advise Kang’s work.
Tymesha-Elizabeth Kindell received her B.A. in History and Sustainable Development from Columbia University. A native of Atlanta, her research centers on race, social, and sports movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century U.S., especially in the American South during the New South Era. Drs. Carl Suddler and Jason Morgan Ward will advise Kindell’s work.
Pauli Purim Manfredini received her B.A. and M.A. from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná. Her research focuses on histories of gender and health, particularly in twentieth-century Brazil. Her dissertation is tentatively titled, “From Menstruation to Menopause: The Medicalization of Women’s Bodies in Early 20th-Century Brazil.” Drs. Jeffrey Lesser, Thomas D. Rogers, and Kylie M. Smith will advise her work.
Yuan Wang received his B.A. from Anhui University and master’s degrees from Shanghai International Studies University and Duke University. His research tracks China’s unique developmental path to modern prosperity in a global context and since early modern period. His doctoral work will examine China’s silk industry and its maritime trade, particularly from 1540 to 1690. Wang’s graduate work will be advised by Drs. Tonio Andrade and Laura Nenzi.
Doctoral candidate Anjuli Webster recently co-edited, together with Dr. Ndumiso Dladla of the University of Pretoria, a special issue of the journal African Economic History titled “Economic Sovereignty in South Africa.” Webster also co-authored one of the articles in the issue with Dladla, titled “Who conquered South Africa? Neocolonialism and Economic Sovereignty.” The abstract of their pece is featured below, and the special issue can be accessed via Project MUSE. Webster is currently completing her dissertation, “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in southern Africa, 1750-1900,” under the advisement of Drs. Clifton Crais, Mariana P. Candido, Yanna Yannakakis, and Thomas D. Rogers.
“The right of conquest is a doctrine in the theory of international law in terms of which victory in war entitles the victor both to the title to territory of the vanquished as well as sovereignty over them. Far from being a mere event, however, conquest is an ongoing process, structure, and relation of domination. Despite the widely celebrated “transition to democracy” and the supposed triumph of popular sovereignty in South Africa in the past three decades, we argue that South Africa’s “democratic” constitutional order remains firmly rooted in the dubious right of conquest asserted since the defeat of its indigenous people in the unjust wars of Western colonization, which began in the mid-seventeenth century. In this article we critically reflect on South African historiography by asking “Who conquered South Africa”? The question is necessary because sovereign power is both misunderstood and obfuscated in South African contemporary history and public discourse. We argue that conquest, and its attendant concepts of sovereignty and war, are deliberately underemphasized in South African historiography despite being at the root of problems regarding economic sovereignty. Our argument considers the problem of succession to conquest, in terms of which both the title to territory and sovereignty over the conquered is transferred from the conqueror to another party who then enjoys these entitlements and powers. We trace various successors in title to Conquest South Africa, and show that their economic power originates in the right of conquest. Their ownership of South Africa’s natural resources originates in the title to territory acquired through its disseisin following the conquest of the indigenous people, and in the same way their continued de facto sovereignty over that population now takes the form of the wanton and relentless exploitation of their labor power.“
Earlier this year, Emory History Department PhD candidate William (Robert) Billups investigated connections between antisemitic networks in South Africa and civil rights opponents in the US South. Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies (TIJS) supported Billups’ research on this topic, which included three weeks at two South African archives, the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and the University of the Free State’s Archive for Contemporary Affairs. Records from those archives helped Billups to understand the links between some US civil rights opponents and far-right groups outside of the US.
In an excellent reflection on the research published by the TIJS, Billups writes:
“As KKK members increasingly perpetrated violence in the civil rights South, some white South Africans sought to join US-based KKK organizations. To study South African Klan members, I spent two weeks in the Archive for Contemporary Affairs in Bloemfontein. Following guidance from the South African historian Milton Shain and the archivist Lwazi Mestile, I focused on the papers of Ray Rudman, South Africa’s self-described Klan leader during the 1950s and 1960s. Rudman’s papers contained letters and recruitment materials about joining a Klan organization based in Waco, Texas.
I expected white South African Klan recruits to describe their opposition to the anti-apartheid movement, a liberation movement that in many ways paralleled the US civil rights movement, as their main motive for joining. Some did. But to my surprise, antisemitic beliefs that far-right South Africans shared with US-based Klan leaders seemed to them an equally important connection, if not a more important one. They described entering the Klan as joining US white supremacists in fighting the supposed international Jewish conspiracy that they falsely believed controlled world communism, the civil rights movement, and the anti-apartheid movement.”
Billups received his doctorate in May 2024. He completed his dissertation, “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1954–1976,” under the advisement of Drs. Joseph Crespino and Allen Tullos. Billups was recognized for his stellar record of research with the Laney Graduate School’s Outstanding Scholarly Research Award.
