Category / Graduate Students

by abritt

Claudia Kreklau (PhD Candidate) Wins Essay Prize from German Studies Association

Claudia Kreklau

Claudia Kreklau and her faculty advisor Dr. Brian Vick.

Big news! Congratulations to Claudia Kreklau for winning the 2017 Graduate Student Essay Prize of the German Studies Association for her paper “Travel, Technology, and Theory: The Aesthetics of Ichthyology during the Second Scientific Revolution.” The prize jury thought that the essay “stood out for its clear organization, its accessible, lucid writing, and its deep level of research.” As part of the Prize, the essay will be published in the German Studies Review. As the laudatio indicates, “whether one comes from the angle of the historian, or literary scholar, or naturalist, this essay offers innovative and persuasive perspectives on the intersection of the natural world with technology and human intervention.” Congratulations, Claudia, on this major achievement!

by abritt

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen (PhD 2016) Wins Dissertation Award

Congratulations to Dr. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen for winning the 2016 Gilbert C. Fite Award for the best dissertation on agricultural history from the Agricultural History Society. He completed his dissertation, “The Cultivated State, Migrants and the Transformation of the Bolivian Lowlands, 1952-2000,” in 2016 under the advisement of Drs. Jeffrey Lesser, Peter Little, Thomas D. Rogers, and Yanna Yannakakis. Read the below for a more detailed explanation of Nobbs-Thiessen’s research:

My research explores the role of migrants in the “March to the East” a large-scale settlement and rural development initiative undertaken by the Bolivian state after 1952.  Over half a century hundreds of thousands of settlers arrived in the tropical Department of Santa Cruz in Bolivia’s Eastern Lowlands to begin new lives as frontier farmers.  Among the migrants were indigenous Bolivians from the nation’s highlands, low-German speaking Mennonites from Canada, Paraguay and Mexico as well as groups of Japanese and Okinawan colonists that had been re-settled with support from the Japanese government and the U.S. military.  Together these diverse streams made the March to the East a uniquely transnational affair and a compelling case study for understanding migration and mid-century rural modernization.

by abritt

Alumni Update: Dr. Glen Goodman (PhD, 2015) Wins Fulbright and German Academic Exchange Service Grants

User Photo

The History Department sends its congratulations to Emory alumnus Glen Goodman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Goodman won a Fulbright grant to teach in the graduate program in History at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, located in Porto Alegre, during the spring semester 2018. In addition, the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) awarded Goodman a research grant to conduct archival work in Berlin during the summer of 2017. Goodman was an advisee of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Department Chair and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.

by abritt

PhD Alumnus Adam T. Rosenbaum on Mentoring the Senior Thesis in ‘Perspectives on History’

PhD alumnus (’11) Adam T. Rosenbaum published an article in the March edition of Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association. The publication, “Leading by Example: The Senior Thesis and the Teacher-Scholar,” charts Rosenbaum’s novel approach to teaching a seminar in which undergraduates write a capstone thesis. Rosenbaum was recently tenured at Colorado Mesa University and his book, Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950, was published by Cambridge UP in 2016. Check out an excerpt below and read the full piece in Perspectives here.

“As I prepared to teach the course a second time, I decided to make some changes. I rewrote the syllabus with a narrower focus on the history of the Third Reich, abandoning the topical flexibility of the first incarnation. I created a five-page bibliography of English-language sources related to that subject, providing students with a significant head start. Then I had another idea: I would write a thesis paper alongside my students, completing all the assignments along the way.”

by abritt

Dr. Erica Bruchko (PhD Alumna) Featured by Emory News Center

Story image

The Emory News Center recently profiled Erica Bruchko, a graduate of Emory’s History Graduate program and now the African American Studies and U.S. history librarian at Emory. The article, titled “Erica Bruchko: Helping researchers in Emory Libraries’ African American, history collections,” charts Bruchko’s trajectory from her time as an undergraduate in South Carolina through her recent work expanding Emory’s impressive library collections. Read the full article here.

by abritt

Graduate Students Design and Teach Spring 2017 Courses

Three graduate students from the History Department are teaching courses this spring to Emory undergraduates. Professors Julia López Fuentes, Audrey Henderson, and Jennifer E. Morgan designed and developed original courses as a part of the Laney Graduate School’s TATTO program. This opportunity provides graduate students with valuable teaching experience and comprises part of the Department’s holistic training for future teachers and scholars.

Check out the syllabi for the Spring 2017 offerings below and browse the courses from Spring 2016, as well.

 

by abritt

Graduate Student Timothy Romans Wins Essay Prize from SECAAS

Congratulations to Emory History Department graduate student Timothy Romans, who recently won a prize for his essay “The Merchant, the Pirate, and the Telescope Maker: The Many Heroic Lives of Hamada Yahyōe.” Awarded by the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (SECAAS), the prize was announced formally at the annual SECAAS meeting in mid-January 2017 in Oxford, Mississippi.

by abritt

Emory Launches First Annual Brazil Week, September 19-23

image of mosquito silhouette

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.

brazil-week-placing-time-flier-copy-1

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.

 

by abritt

Incoming PhD Student Virgo Morrison Featured by Emory News Center

morrison-screenshot.png
This fall the Emory History Department welcomes a stellar new cohort of ten first-year graduate students. One of those students, Virgo Morrison, was recently profiled by the Emory News Center. An advisee of Joseph Crespino, Morrison’s research focuses on the impacts of drug abuse and drug policy in the South. Copied below is Morrison’s profile. Check out a few of the other incoming students to the Laney Graduate School here.

Virgo Morrison

Hometown: Woodstock, Georgia

Emory degree program: PhD in history

Completed degrees: BA in history, MA in history, Virginia State University

Focus of scholarship: Traditionally, drug abuse has been perceived as primarily a Northern metropolitan phenomenon and much of narcotics history has been similarly one-dimensional. Through my research I intend to broaden the field by exploring the impact drug abuse and drug policy had across the rural-urban spectrum in the 20th century American South. I am specifically interested in how regional manifestations of segregation, conservativism, and drug rehabilitation influenced the formation of drug policy and popular sentiments about drug abuse.

Why it matters: If the current opioid epidemic has shown us anything, it is that we still do not understand how to craft effective drug policies. It is perhaps too ambitious to hope there is an answer to this problem within our history but I do believe that an accurate account of our past successes and failures could provide us with, at the very least, a solid foundation.

Proudest academic achievement to date: While completing my master’s degree I picked up a day job as a masonry restoration specialist for a historic preservation company. My days were spent tuckpointing marble balustrades or laying brick six stories high whereas my nights were spent formatting footnotes and reading for classes. Looking back now I view this experience as an accomplishment rather than an obstacle. I never missed a class, I graduated, and I even became a decent bricklayer to boot.

by abritt

Claudia Kreklau, History PhD student, is featured in a German Newspaper (HAZ) for her research

The German newspaper Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung (HAZ) reported on third year PhD student Claudia Kreklau’s work on nineteenth-century food. The regional paper featured Claudia’s research at the World of Kitchen (WOK) Museum in Hannover.

The archive welcomed the Emory student to gather data among their 7000-volume collection of cookbooks and ephemera, including various copies of the Practical Cookbook by nineteenth-century best-selling author Henriette Davidis, a vegetarian guide from the fin-de-siècle, and advertisements connected to the industrialization of foodstuffs. The wider collection houses objects of material culture which, along with Claudia’s findings of handwritten recipes, household diaries, and correspondence in the WOK’s manuscript collection, will contribute to her research on the development of German cooking traditions and questions of identity in the nineteenth century.

Claudia Kreklau is advised by Dr. Brian Vick.

The print version circulated July 7, 2016. E-version published July 10, 2016.

Read the original article here.