Doctoral candidate Camille Goldmon will present a paper as part of the Southern Historical Association’s Junior Scholars Workshop (via Zoom) on March 17, 2022, from 4-5pm. Goldmon’s paper is titled “Shades of Radicalism: The History of Radical Agrarian Organizations in Alabama.” Connie Lester (UCF) and R. Douglas Hurt (Purdue) will offer brief commentary.
Congratulations to graduate student Robert Billups on receiving the Joseph and Eva R. Dave Fellowship from the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA). The fellowship will provide Billups with research access to the AJA’s renowned collections on the historic campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since its inception in 1976, the fellowship program has has brought nearly 600 scholars from over 20 countries to conduct research in Cincinnati. Billups’s dissertation, “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955–1976,” examines violence against the U.S. civil rights movement in the middle of the twentieth century.
Doctoral candidate Luke Hagemann will introduce Laney Graduate students to the practice of compassionate pedagogy in an upcoming session titled “Practicing Compassionate Pedagogy in the College Classroom.” Participants will equip themselves with a framework for incorporating kindness into their course designs in order to make the classroom more accessible, supportive, and equitable. Hageman’s talk is part of the Dobes Series for Excellence in Teaching, which features winners of the Martha and William Dobes Outstanding Graduate Teaching Fellow Award. The event will take place via Zoom from 5-7pm on March 17, 2022. Find out more information below and here.
Mary Grace DuPree, a doctoral student in history, was recently accepted as postulant for ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta. DuPree is an Ancient History student whose research centers on the intersections of history, religion, and art history. Her dissertation, titled “Faces of David: Late Antique and Medieval David Cycles in East and West,” analyzes the story of the Biblical King David as told in visual narrative in Coptic, Byzantine, Western Medieval and Crusader art.
Congratulations to second-year graduate student Olivia Cocking on winning the 2021 John L. Snell Memorial Prize from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. The prize recognizes the best graduate seminar paper in European History. Cocking was awarded for her piece, “Pronatalism’s Peripheries: Housing Poor Women in Early Third Republic Paris, 1880 – 1912.” Associate Professor Judith A. Miller advises Cocking’s graduate work.
Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies recently published a feature of the pandemic-era work of History doctoral candidate Anastasiia Strakhova, who was the Anne and Bill Newton Graduate Fellow at the Rose Library for 2020-21. After COVID-19 thoroughly derailed her original plans for the fellowship year, Strakhova responded by organizing two virtual workshops on grant writing and the process of conducting research during the pandemic, respectively. Strakhova won a highly competitive Summer Dissertation Writing Grant from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), which is currently supporting her work completing the dissertation, titled “Selective Emigration: Border Control and the Jewish Escape in Late Imperial Russia, 1881-1914.” Drs. Eric Goldstein and Ellie R. Schainker are advisors to Strakhova. Read the full article from the Tam Institute here: “Doctoral Candidate Creates Workshops Amidst Pandemic.”
The Emory Center for Digital Scholarship recently named History PhD candidate Stephanie Bryan a Digital Humanities Fellow. As an ECDS fellow Bryan will serve as associate editor for the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Atlanta Studies. Bryan’s research is advised by Cahoon Professor of American History Patrick Allitt and Professor Allen E. Tullos, who is also co-director of the ECDS. Read an excerpt about Bryan’s research below along with the biographies of the other 2021-22 ECDS Fellows.
Bryan’s dissertation traces the habitat losses and decreased biodiversity caused by cotton and other monocultures in the southeastern United States. At the same time, it reveals how a diverse array of human practices actually supported a few marginalized indigenous species, such as opossums, persimmons, muscadines, and pokeweed. Her dissertation examines the ways in which these plants and animals, often labeled as “weeds” and “pests,” persisted and entered into the diets, cultures, economies, and politics of Euro-Americans and people of African descent, from slavery through Jim Crow.
History graduate student Anjuli Webster recently published an article titled ‘South African Social Science and the Azanian Philosophical Tradition‘ in the journal Theoria. Webster is a student in African history with research interests in legal history, empire, sovereignty, and borderlands in Southern Africa, especially. Read the abstract from Webster’s piece below, along with the full article: “South African Social Science and the Azanian Philosophical Tradition.”
This article discusses the contemporary history of South Afri-can social science in relation to the Azanian Philosophical Tradition. It is addressed directly to white scholars, urging introspection with regard to the ethical question of epistemic justice in relation to the evolution of the social sciences in conqueror South Africa. I consider the establishment of the professional social sciences at South African universities in the early twentieth century as a central part of the epistemic project of conqueror South Africa. In contrast, the Azanian Philosophical Tradition is rooted in African philosophy and articulated in resistance against the injustice of conquest and colonialism in southern Africa since the seventeenth century. It understands conquest as the fundamental historical antagonism shaping the philosophical, political, and material problem of ‘South Africa’. The tradition is silenced by and exceeds the political and epistemic strictures of the settler colonial nation state and social science.
History Ph.D. student Ayssa Yamagutchi Norek produced, assistant directed, and wrote the lyrics to the short film “Neon Phantom,” which recently won the Pardino d’Oro SRG SSR for the Best International Short Film at the Locarno Film Festival. The festival is one of the five biggest in the world. “Neon Phantom” has been selected for other international festivals, including the Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara, Mexico. Norek’s graduate work centers on modern Brazil, women’s studies, and female incarceration. Her graduate advisors are Jeffrey Lesser and Thomas D. Rogers.
Two History Department students have received research awards through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. PhD candidate Georgia Brunner will study and research gender, labor, and identity between 1918-1985 in the building of Rwanda. Undergraduate alum Jesse Steinman (21C), a history and German studies double major, was selected for the Fulbright Community-Based Combined Award in History for a project developing an interreligious educational program about Graz, Austria’s Jewish history. Read the full list of Emory students selected for Fulbright awards this season here.
