Category / Graduate Students

by emoryhistorydept

Doctoral Student Becca Aponte Publishes Two-Part Series in AHA’s ‘Perspectives’


Third-year doctoral student Becca Aponte (African history) has published a pair of articles in the American Historical Association’s newsmagazine Perspectives on History. Aponte’s columns examine the theme “Africa, Women, and the Global History of Capitalism” through contemporary and historical commerce and culture in Dakar, Senegal.

The columns intersect with Aponte’s research in French West Africa, which (as she describes) examines “how women constructed alternative regimes of property, credit, and commerce across a century of imperial expansion in rural Senegal – from the abolition of slavery to the dismantling of colonial subjecthood.” Aponte’s graduate work is advised by Professors Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais.

Read about Aponte and the other summer 2026 Perspectives columnists here, and find links to her two columns:

“Capitalism at Ground Level”

By Becca Aponte
Published July 30, 2026

“Small Property, Big Meanings”

By Becca Aponte
Published September 15, 2026

by emoryhistorydept

Welcoming 2026 Graduate Cohort


The Emory History Department is pleased to welcome four new doctoral students for the fall 2026 semester. Browse abridged profiles of the new graduate cohort below and follow the links to read their full biographies on the History Department website.

Asa Ackerly received his B.A. from Boston College. Framed by Latin American environmental and economic history, his research examines the different development models that Mexico pursued in the nineteenth century to accelerate economic growth and advance national sovereignty. His advisors are Drs. Thomas D. Rogers and Yanna Yannakakis.

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Theophilus Humphrey is an Atlanta native and received his B.A. and M.A. from Georgia State University. He studies the labor, entrepreneurial networks, and community institutions that African Americans built across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paying particular attention to the Sweet Auburn district. His advisors are Drs. Crystal Sanders and Carl Suddler.

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Micah Lynn received his B.A. from the University of Southern Mississippi and M.A. from the University of Kentucky. Lynn studies the intersection of racial violence, memory, and place in the American South and its borderlands. He aims to use oral history to extend the study of lynching further into the 20th century. His advisors are Prof. Hank Klibanoff, Dr. Allen E. Tullos, and Dr. Jason Morgan Ward.

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Sophie Reed received her B.A. from the University of Michigan. She is interested in race and ethnicity, media studies, women and gender studies with a focus on health, disability studies, cultural history, American studies, and archives. Her interdisciplinary research sociohistorically contextualizes the phenomenon of culturally-mediated eating disorders and body image in minority populations in the US across the 20th century. Her graduate advisors are Drs. Eric L. Goldstein, Ellie R. Schainker, and Chris Suh.

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by emoryhistorydept

Emory News Features Cross-Disciplinary, Collaborative Research among Lesser and Students


The Emory News Center recently published a feature story about the research led by Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, in the Bom Retiro neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil. Headlined “Understanding health, history and environment in urban Brazil,” the piece highlights the innovative methods that inform Lesser’s work, including for his most recent book, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2025). The article also describes the productive cross-disciplinary collaborations that Lesser has cultivated with graduate and undergraduate students, including second-year doctoral student Paula Manfredini and History honors student Lucia Alexeyev.

Find an excerpt of the piece below, and read the full article.

“Lesser, who frequently visits the neighborhood accompanied by student researchers who are just as likely to be medical, theology or public health scholars as history majors, researches the historical dimensions of how health problems arise — not just via germs or disease, but also from the many different ways people live their daily lives within the urban environment. This unusual approach brings his team into contact with a wide variety of individuals who shape public health, including policymakers, street-level health teams and and ordinary people from diverse backgrounds.

‘Being a historian is a great way to be left alone,’ says Lesser, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin American History at Emory. ‘But I started to realize I would be a better scholar if I was surrounded by people who had different expertise than my own, who challenged me as opposed to my doing it all in my own head.‘”

by emoryhistorydept

Cerveira Wins AHA’s Beveridge Grant in Western Hemisphere History


Bruna Digiacomo Cerveira, fourth-year doctoral candidate in Latin American history, received the 2026 Beveridge Family Research Grant in Western Hemisphere History from the American Historical Association. The grant will support research for her dissertation project, “Liberated African Children Between Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and British Imperialism in Rio de Janeiro, 1831–1888.” Cerveira is among just eleven graduate students in history nationwide to receive the AHA’s Beveridge grant this cycle. Her dissertation is advised by Drs. Mariana P. Candido and Thomas D. Rogers.

by emoryhistorydept

Starr Receives LGS Inclusive Excellence Award


Jordyn Alvarez Starr received the 2026 Laney Award for Inclusive Excellence in Graduate Education. This award recognizes students who “engage in service activities that promote inclusivity in the graduate community while also helping to develop and implement strategies to remove barriers for historically marginalized groups and helping them participate fully in graduate education and their respective professions.” Starr was one of four recipients of the award this year.

Starr is a graduate student in Latin American and Caribbean History with research interests centered on struggles against slavery and imperialism in the Spanish Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico. Starr’s dissertation project, titled “Revolutionary Rhetoric: Antislavery and Anticolonial Alliances in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” is advised by Drs. Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis.

by emoryhistorydept

Celebrating 2026 History Department Graduates


Emory’s 2026 Commencement ceremonies took place May 7-11, 2026, and the History Department had many reasons to celebrate. 25 History undergraduate majors or joint majors walked across the stage. Seven of those, after completing compelling original theses under the advisement of dedicated faculty, graduated with honors in History.

Latin American History doctoral candidate Alejandro Guardado defended his dissertation, titled “Indigenous Intellectuals, Cultural Brokers, and the Struggle for Native Self-Determination in Late Twentieth-Century Oaxaca, Mexico.” Kaelyn McAdam, a doctoral student in Ancient history, completed her dissertation, “Understanding the Graeculi: A Greek Roman Empire in the Third and Fourth Centuries,” and graduated in the summer of 2025. Five other graduate students received their interim master’s.

Departmental leadership, faculty, and staff celebrate these exceptional, collective accomplishments of the 2025-’26 academic year.

Expand the sections below to learn more about the graduating and degree-receiving students. Also catch a replay of the 2026 Emory College Honors Ceremony and browse photos of the Commencement ceremonies.

The following graduate students received their interim master’s degree:

Bruna Digiacomo Cerveira Coutinho (Summer 2025)
Co-advisors: Mariana Candido and Thomas D. Rogers


Gerardo Manrique de Lara Ruiz (Summer 2025)
Co-advisors: Mariana Candido and Clifton Crais


Rene K. Odanga (Summer 2025)
Co-advisors: Mariana Candido and Clifton Crais


Emilie Cunning (Fall 2025)
Co-Advisors: Mary L. Dudziak and Jason Morgan Ward


Yuan Zeng Ashley Tan (Fall 2025)
Advisor: Tonio Andrade

The following undergraduates completed either a major or joint major in History and were recognized at the 2026 commencement:

Lucia Kumari Alexeyev
Adrien Jonah Dolin Armstrong
Daniel Hays Bell
Kennedie Amanda Black
Ciera Merie Butler
Edmund Humphrey Cayley
Georgios Drakos
Chloe Nanci Glazer
Mya D. Green*
Isaac Paul Jaye
Jiarui Jiang
Thora Jordt
Alice Liu**
Victoria Mia Maza
Isabella J. Mazet
Lola Kate McGuire
Rachel Elizabeth Mehler
Javier Andres De Jesus Montano
Leo Abraham Raykher
Dylan Robert Sanders Villegas
Joel Moa Shin
Siya Sanjeev Thadani
Xipei Wan
Megan Xing
Yiqi Zhang

* Graduating summer 2026
** Graduating fall 2026

The following students completed honors thesis and graduated with honors in History.

Lucia Kumari Alexeyev, “Vieques Se Levanta: A History of Health Amidst Occupation”
Faculty Director: Professor Jeffrey Lesser

Daniel Bell, “Public Men in Glass Houses: Herbert Jenkins and the Remaking of the Atlanta Police Department, 1947-1972”
Faculty Director: Professor Joseph Crespino

Edmund Cayley, “The First East Turkestan Republic: The Rise of 20th Century Uyghur Nationalism”
Faculty Director: Professor Matthew Payne

Lola McGuire, “‘This stand I make is not alone’: Uncovering the Chicago Young Patriots Organization Women, 1968-1973”
Faculty Director: Professor Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez

Leo Raykher, “Economics, Espionage, Exile: The Surveilled Life of David Drucker, Esq.”
Faculty Director: Professor Jonathan Prude

Siya Thadani, “Medicalizing Difference: Science and the Making of Race in the British Empire”
Faculty Director: Professor Chris Suh

Thomas Wan, “For the Nation and the Revolution: Inner Mongols in the Shadow of Empire and Civil War (1931-49)”
Faculty Director: Professor Matthew Payne

by emoryhistorydept

Doctoral Candidate Emilie Cunning Publishes Article in ‘Modern American History’


Earlier this spring Doctoral candidate Emilie Cunning published an article titled “The Making of a Militarized War on Poverty: The Effort to Triangulate Military Service, Crime Prevention, and Social Citizenship through Project 100,000 and Project Transition” in the journal Modern American History. Cunning interprets these two programs, which focused on the military recruitment and rehabilitation of low-IQ men, as sitting at the nexus between the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam. Cunning’s graduate work is advised by Drs. Daniel LaChance and Mary L. Dudziak.

Separately, Cunning was recently accepted to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Summer Institute for ABD candidates. Held at the Ohio State University and hosted by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Summer 2026 Institute is co-directed by Christopher McKnight Nichols (Ohio State) and Andrew Preston (University of Virginia).

Read the abstract from Cunning’s Modern American History article below and find the full version here.

This article explores the programs known as Project 100,000 and Project Transition developed within the Johnson administration during the Vietnam War. Viewing them as the intersection between the War on Poverty and the War in Vietnam, this article contends with how these programs were designed to serve the goals both of social uplift and crime prevention through the rehabilitation of low-IQ men via military service. The article analyzes the racialized aspects of these programs, as they were disproportionately composed of Black men, and questions the motivations behind the construction of Project 100,000 and Project Transition as a means of “transporting” America’s racial unrest abroad. At its core, the article argues that these programs were inherently at odds with the intense manpower demands of the Vietnam War and the reluctancies of military officials to properly train Project 100,000 men. The program formed another tragedy of the Vietnam era.

by emoryhistorydept

Alejandro Guardado Among Inaugural Recipients of Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Award


Alejandro Guardado, a 2026 graduate of the Latin American History doctoral program, has won the Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Award from Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. Guardado’s project is titled “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn, 1968–2000.”

Inaugurated in 2025, Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Awards honor the life and legacy of Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the Peruvian priest and theologian widely seen as the father of Latin American liberation theology. The award supports projects in theology, history, and the social sciences that engage or take inspiration from Gutiérrez’s work on the preferential option for the poor.

Guardado was among five recipients in the first cycle of the award. Read more about the award and the recipients’ projects: “Cushwa Center announces 2026 research funding, including five inaugural Gutiérrez Research Awards.”

Guardado completed his dissertation under the advisement of Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Department Chair.

by emoryhistorydept

Emory Students Analyze “Sports, Power, and Society” in Course Co-Taught by Suddler


In the spring 2026 semester, Dr. Carl Suddler, Associate Professor of History, and Emory sociologist Dr. Karida Brown have offered an interdisciplinary course called “Sports, Power, and Society.” Building on the “Last Lectures” series, a curriculum developed by Civil Rights icon and sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards, the course analyzes how sport intersects with an array of topics, from race, politics, and fashion to urban planning, inequality, and global power.

Students in the spring course have benefitted from the proximity of the upcoming FIFA World Cup, which will bring the high-stakes global soccer to Atlanta and 15 other host cities in North America this summer. Atlanta and Los Angeles are the only two cities in the U.S. to host both a summer Olympic games and the World Cup. This fact, Suddler and Brown argue, have made Emory the ideal place to study the power of sport in shaping culture, cities, economies, and everyday life.

Emory History graduate students Andrew Aldridge (U.S. History, 5th year) and Tymesha-Elizabeth Kindell (U.S. History, 2nd year) serve as teaching assistants for the course.


Fox 5 Atlanta recently interviewed Suddler about the offering, the World Cup’s impact on Atlanta, and parallels between the 2026 mega event and the 1996 Olympics. Find the conversation here: “Emory offers class on impact of FIFA World Cup.”

by emoryhistorydept

Graduate Student Alejandro Guardado Wins AHA Beveridge Grant


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.