Category / Graduate Students

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Pugh and Webster Win 2019-’20 McLean Prize

Congratulations to History graduate students Aleo Pugh and Anjuli Webster on winning the 2019-’20 Ross H. and May B. McLean prize. Established to honor Dr. McLean at his retirement in 1957, the prize is awarded each year to the first-year student/s in the History graduate program who achieved the most distinguished record for the year. Pugh’s graduate work, which is advised by Profs. Walter Rucker, Jason Ward, and Carol Anderson, examines African American history, social history, memory studies, and Black feminist theory in the Twentieth-Century United States. Profs. Clifton Crais and Yanna Yannakakis advise Webster, whose research engages issues related to empire, law and sovereignty in southeastern Africa. Find previous winners of the McLean Prize here.

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Webster Wins 2019-’20 Francis S. Benjamin Prize

Image credit: Jacques Nicolas Bellin, Carte de la coste orientale d’Afrique depuis le Cap de Bonne Esperance jusqu’au Cap del Gada (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Libraries, 1740), islandora:19752, Islandora Repository, University of Cape Town Digital Collections.

Congratulations to History graduate student Anjuli Webster on winning the 2019-20 Francis S. Benjamin prize for her paper, “From extraction to enclosure: Delagoa Bay as aqueous borderland in the nineteenth century.” The paper traces the history of failed British claims to Portuguese Delagoa Bay in south Eastern Africa over the nineteenth century. Through disputes over geography, jurisdiction, and possession of this imperial outpost, the border between what would become Mozambique and South Africa slowly and episodically coalesced long before the territorial carve up of Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884.

The Benjamin prize was established in early 1974 in memory of Francis Benjamin who taught at Emory from 1946 till 1973. This gift is used to reward the best paper written by a graduate student during their first two years in the Emory History PhD program. View previous winners of the prize here.

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PhD Student Robert Billups Wins Grant for Research at LBJ Presidential Library

Third-year graduate student Robert Billups has been awarded a Moody Research Grant for his current project, titled “White Supremacist Bombings and Arsons Against U.S. Civil Rights Institutions, 1940-1975.” The grant, which is underwritten by The Moody Foundation and awarded by a faculty committee from the University of Texas at Austin, will support Billups as he conducts research at the LBJ Presidential Library. Billups is advised by Joseph Crespino, History Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor, and Allen Tullos, Professor and Co-Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.

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PhD Student Anjuli Webster Publishes Article in the ‘South African Historical Journal’

Second-year PhD student Anjuli Webster recently published an article in the South African Historical Journal. The article is titled “Transatlantic Knowledge: Race Relations, Social Science and Native Education in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa.” Webster’s faculty advisers are Dr. Clifton Crais and Dr. Yanna Yannakakis. Read the abstract of “Transatlantic Knowledge” below along with the full article.

In this paper I trace knowledge flows between South Africa and the United States in the early twentieth century. I analyse these flows as parts within a broader white supremacist political project and technology of power. Focusing on the early Union period from the 1910s to the 1930s, I explore links, networks and exchanges within and across imperial and colonial spaces that spanned the Atlantic. These include institutional, financial, intellectual and personal relationships and networks between philanthropic institutions, race relations ‘experts’ and social scientists. In particular, I focus on the South African Institute of Race Relations’ role in importing education models from the American South and shaping narratives around ‘native education’ in South Africa. In this case, positivist science functioned to instil and root a racial order. I argue that attending to the circulation and entanglement of ideas between these global spheres offers new insight into the genealogy of anthropological and social scientific knowledge during the historical conjuncture of the Union period.

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Graduate Student and Digital Dissertation Scholar Camille Goldmon Presents Work on Tuskegee Ag Men

History Graduate Student Camille Goldmon was a member of the 2019-’20 cohort of the Digital Dissertation Scholars Program (DDSP), a joint effort of the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI) Digital Publishing in the Humanities initiative and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS). The yearlong program prepares doctoral students to create meaningful, sustainable, and accessible digital scholarship by equipping them with practical training and financial support. Goldmon presented the work she produced as a part of this program earlier this year. Watch her presentation, titled “Tuskegee Ag Men: A Digital Supplement to ‘On the Right Side of Radicalism: Black Farmers in Rural Alabama, 1881-1940,′” on the Emory Scholar Blogs website.

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History Faculty and Students Receive Grants from The Halle Institute for Global Research

Over the past academic year History Department faculty and graduate and undergraduate students received numerous grants from Emory’s Halle Institute for Global Research. View the History Department awardees and their projects below, and see the full list of Halle grant recipients from across Emory’s campuses.

URC-Halle International Research Award:

  • Astrid M. Eckert – “Germany and the Global Commons: Environment, Diplomacy, and the Market”
  • Pablo Palomino – “Carnivore Capitalism: A Global Cultural History of Argentine Beef”

Halle-CFDE Global Atlanta Innovative Teaching (GAIT) Grant:

Undergraduate Global Research Fellows, 2020-21:

  • Nayive Gaytán – “Disappearing Acts?: Pueblos Mágicos and the Politics of Erasure,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: Spanish and History

Graduate Global Research Fellows, 2020-21:

  • Georgia Brunner – “Cultivating a Nation: Gender and the Political Economies of Nationalism in Late Colonial Rwanda”
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‘Classes that Click’: Emory News Center Features Crais’s Virtual ‘The Making of Modern South Africa’

Image may contain: 1 person, sitting, screen, table, office and indoor

The Emory News Center’s Leigh DeLozier recently featured Dr. Clifton Crais, graduate assistant Georgia Brunner, and several students from his “Making of Modern South Africa” class. Crais, Brunner, and the students share their perspectives on finding success in the online transition. Read an excerpt from the article below, along with the full piece: “Classes that click: The making of modern South Africa.”

What’s one lesson you’ve learned during this transition, and how will you use it later?

Crais: The importance of human contact and our common humanity, beginning with the simple act of looking into another person’s eyes. I will renew my effort to develop a unique relationship with each and every student, no matter how large the class. Paradoxically, online teaching has taught me the importance of a residential college experience. We are learning new things about the world and about each other. We are going to come out of this crisis better teachers and better students – and citizens.

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Hannah Abrahamson Wins AHA’s Beveridge Research Grant

4th-year doctoral student Hannah Abrahamson was recently awarded a Beveridge Research Grant from the American Historical Association. Abrahamson is a historian of colonial Mexico writing a dissertation entitled, “Women of the Encomienda: Households and Dependents in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Yucatan, Mexico.” The Beveridge grant supports research in the history of the Western Hemisphere (the United States, Canada, and Latin America).

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Emory History Department Updates in the Context of COVID-19

Emory University will extend spring break until March 22, after which the institution will transition to remote learning for graduate and undergraduate classes. Visit Emory’s COVID-19 page for details about these changes, and please contact History Department faculty and staff via email with individual questions or concerns. History Department staff and faculty will work remotely for the next several weeks.

All History Department seminars, workshops, and book events have been canceled for the remainder of the semester, including the History Department Workshop scheduled for this Friday, March 20, featuring Dr. Thomas D. Rogers and Dr. Jeffrey T. Manuel, and the celebration of Dr. Sharon Strocchia’s recently-published monograph, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, slated for next week. In lieu of the in-person events featuring these works, check out two recent posts about them:

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Emory History Faculty, Graduate Students, and Alumni at #AHA2020

Faculty, students, and alumni from the Emory History Department were well represented at this year’s American Historical Association meeting in New York City. Scroll through the images below for a glimpse at some of the Emory historians at the AHA.

rogers

Dr. Thomas Rogers (2nd from right) opened the late-breaking session “Land Use and Climate Change—Historical Perspectives from Seven Continents”

yannakakis,chira

Prof. Adriana Chira (right) was honored with the Paul Vanderwood Prize of 2019, awarded by the Conference of Latin American History for the best English-language article on Latin American history published in a journal other than the Hispanic American Historical Review and the Americas. Prof. Chira is pictured here with Prof. Yanna Yannakakis.

suddler

Prof. Carl Suddler visiting his book ‘Presumed Criminal’ at the NYU Press booth.

crespino

Dr. Joe Crespino on his way to a Saturday morning panel.

meyer,ramsay

Emma C. Meyer and Rebekah Ramsay were part of the panel “Forging Citizenship after Empire: Reflections from Asia and the Middle East in the 20th Century”

britt,wiggins

Andrew G. Britt (PhD 2018, now at University of North Carolina School of the Arts) and Danielle L. Wiggins (PhD 2018, now at Caltech) presented on the panel “Planning, Difference, and Dislocation in the Black Americas: Atlanta, Port-au-Prince, and Sao Paulo”

lopez

Julia Lopez Fuentes presented her paper “Conflict and Fragmentation within the Europeanist Opposition to the Franco Regime, 1962-68” as part of the panel “Tolerating Totalitarianism: Why did the Franco Dictatorship survive?”