Directors of the Imagining Democracy Lab: Carol Anderson (left) and Bernard Fraga (right)
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory College a $526,000 grant for the creation of the Imagining Democracy Lab, an interdisciplinary center dedicated to civic engagement and democratic participation. Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African-American Studies and Associated Faculty the History Department, will serve as the co-director of the lab alongside Dr. Bernard L. Fraga, associate professor of political science and a specialist in race, elections, and voter behavior. The lab will partner with Georgia-based organizations in and around Atlanta, along with units on Emory’s campus like the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (directed by Dr. Allen E. Tullos, Professor of History). Read more about this initiative via April Hunt’s article from the Emory News Center: “Civic engagement focus of new Mellon Foundation grant awarded to Emory College.”
Drs. Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Mariana Armond Dias Paes, Co-Leaders of “Land Dispossession, Inequality, and the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America”
During the fall of 2022, Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Mariana Armond Dias Paes of the Max Plank Institute for Legal History received a three-year grant from Emory’s Office of the Provost. Titled “Land Dispossession, Inequality, and the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America,” the project is one of five that will receive a part of $1.4 million in support. The three historians will use the resources to conduct research, develop a digital platform, and initiate several pedagogical innovations focusing on land politics and sustainability in post-emancipation societies in Africa and Latin America. They will be engaging with primary sources located in endangered archives, including Cuba, Cape Verde, and Angola, while also developing new ways of sharing some of this material through public-facing platforms and new courses at undergraduate and graduate level.
The three project leaders point out that their work emerges from a belief that the humanities, and historical approaches in particular, are fields that are uniquely positioned to offer new ways of thinking about land dispossession, rural inequalities, and environmental sustainability. According to Candido, Chira, and Dias Paes, such approaches allow scholars to examine dispossession in the long term, exploring how present-day expulsion from the land is rooted in socio-economic structures dating back to slavery and colonialism. A humanistic approach to land dispossession also sheds light on alternative modes of community-building and property ownership that emerged from below that more quantitative social scientific approaches have ignored. Dias Paes emphasizes that “much of the legal framework of today´s legal system in what concerns property was created in the nineteenth century. Thus, if we want to reform these legal systems in the sense of shifting the current model of exploitation, we must discuss their roots and de-naturalize legal ideas such as ‘absolute ownership right,’ ‘legal personality,’ and so on.”
At the core of the project is a fundamental commitment to collaboration as a tool for writing and practicing better history. Candido and Chira are extremely excited to develop their collaboration with Mariana Dias Paes (with whom Candido has been working for a few years now), an ambitious visionary thinker in the field of legal history. Dias Paes is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt am Main) where she heads the project “Global Legal History on the Ground: Court Cases in African Archives.” In the framework of the project, she has been digitizing over 30,000 court cases stored at the Cape Verde National Archives. Since 2017, together with Mariana Candido and Juelma Ngãla (ISCED-Benguela, Angola), she organized the court cases collection of the Benguela District Court (Angola). Her research focuses on the social and legal history of the South Atlantic (Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau), between the 17th and the 20th centuries. She has published extensively on issues pertaining to judicial disputes over land and labor in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Her publications include: Esclavos y tierras entre posesión y títulos: la construcción social del derecho de propiedad en Brasil, siglo XIX (2021) and Escravidão e direito: o estatuto jurídico dos escravos no Brasil oitocentista, 1860-1888 (2019). She has also published articles in flagship journals such as Law & History Review, Atlantic Studies, Administory-Zeitschrift für Verwaltungsgeschichte. Since 2020, she serves as book review editor of the Journal of Global Slavery. She has been affiliated with international projects funded by the European Commission, the Max Planck Society, and CNPq/Brazil.
Court Cases from 19th and early 20th century located at the larger storage Room/ Deposit at the Benguela Court House (Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela, in Portuguese), Angola, 2019
Smaller Storage Room at the Benguela Court House 2017
Dias Paes began researching the relation between law and slavery while she was in Law School. “It was during my masters, on freedom suits filed by enslaved people in Brazil, that I came to realize that the legal categories structuring these court cases and the legal arguments within them were the same ones used in land disputes. I decided to study this entanglement deeper during my Ph.D., and it became evident that the legal connection between property ownership and land ownership was mutually constitutive with broader economic and social relations. This was such a fascinating topic, that connected historiographical fields that do not often engage with each other, that I decided to pursue this topic further in the following years. For me, it is now clear that the history of slavery and land dispossession in the Global South is the basis of the current climate crisis.”
Asked to explain more about the collaborations that will emerge through the framework of this grant, Dias Paes said the project “will be fundamental to put my own individual research in perspective and access my results in a more complex fashion. When one is doing research individually, time and resources end up restricting the geographical and time scope of our work. Working collaboratively allows us to compare different contexts and thus understand with more complexity local process. Collaboration is fundamental to global and transnational research while allowing us to also conduct meticulous empirical research. Moreover, our project puts together researchers with different backgrounds, historians, and lawyers. This interdisciplinary collaboration will also deepen our debates and analysis. But our collaboration is not restricted to the project. We will also strengthen our partnerships with archival institutions in the Global South. In the age of digital humanities, it is urgent that we put forward debates on digital infrastructure and data sovereignty in Africa and Latin America. Digital humanities projects can both deepen the asymmetries between the Global South and the Global North or it can be an emancipatory tool, that broadens the access of Global South scholars to research infrastructures. Thus, we want our partnerships to be a laboratory on how to do digital humanities in the least asymmetrical way possible. Serious dialogue with our partners will be the key to achieving this goal.”
Learn more about the work of the three project leaders of “Land Dispossession, Inequality, and the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America” on their faculty pages:
The graduate research fellowships committee of the American Society for Environmental History has awarded doctoral candidate Anjuli Webster their 2023 Hal Rothman Dissertation Fellowship. Named in honor of Hal Rothman, recipient of ASEH’s 2006 Distinguished Service award and editor of Environmental History for many years, the fellowship carries an award of $1,000. The prize will help to support research for Webster’s dissertation, titled “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in southern Africa, 1750-1900” and advised by Drs. Clifton Crais, Mariana P. Candido, Yanna Yannakakis, and Thomas D. Rogers.
Two History Department faculty members have received a grant from a program within the Emory Office of the Provost designed to foster research and scholarly work that advances social justice. Dr. Mariana P. Candido, Associate Professor, and Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor, are collaborating on a project titled “Land Dispossession, Inequality and the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America.” The project envisions the creation of an open-access digital resource on these themes, two undergraduate courses at Emory, and trips to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Read a fuller description of the initiative below, along with other projects funded through this program: “Emory awards funds for five faculty projects focused on arts and social justice.”
“This project, conducted in collaboration with Mariana Dias Paes at the Max Planck Institute for Law and Legal Theory, will study land dispossession in Africa and Latin America and establish an open-access digital resource that shares critical historical documents, transcripts, legal papers and other records relating to the topic. The grant also funds the creation of two undergraduate courses on the politics of development, rural transformation and food sovereignty that will combine a trip to Puerto Rico and Cuba with in-class instruction.“
The 2022 Loren & Gail Starr Fellows in Experiential Learning recently presented the projects for which they received funding over the summer. These fellowships were created in 2022 through a generous donation from Loren and Gail Starr. They provide summer funding from $500 to $3000 for experiential learning projects proposed by History majors, joint majors, or minors. The Starr Award aims to support students who wish to use the knowledge and skills they have acquired in history courses to create or participate in projects outside of the classroom. Bold, creative, and off-the-beaten path proposals are encouraged. The 2022 Fellows outdid themselves with creative historical projects. Learn more about the inspiring work they recently shared with History Dept. faculty, students, and staff below:
Edina Hartstein Presenting StoryMap on Trafficking in Women and Children
Senior Film Studies Honors student and History Major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo created a spectacular animated film on Asian American History that explored the dynamics of racism in the present and past. We look forward to posting an update with a link to the film in the future.
Emory Professor of History Sharon Strocchia has been named a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, NJ for the Fall 2022 term. One of the world’s foremost centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry, IAS brings together over 200 scholars from around the world every year. Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions.
Research at IAS is conducted across four Schools – Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Science – to push the boundaries of human knowledge. Past IAS members include 35 Nobel Laureates, and the site has hosted scholars ranging from Albert Einstein to Clifford Geertz.
During the fellowship, Strocchia will have the opportunity to pursue uninterrupted scholarly work, share her research, and receive feedback from other participants in an intellectually stimulating and generative environment. She will use the time to work on her next book project, tentatively titled Health for Sale: Marketing Medical Trust in Late Renaissance Italy.
“My book examines how trust in new pharmaceutical remedies was built in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italy,” said Strocchia. “It asks how Renaissance markets balanced concerns about safety and efficacy with the need for medical innovation, given the changing disease environments caused by early globalization. Many of the questions I explore – the award of patent privileges, the use of human subjects in drug trials, the development of trademarks and brand names – have important implications for understanding the long-term development of Western pharmaceutical markets.”
The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation has awarded doctoral candidate Robert Billups a travel research grant to support two weeks of research in their collections. Centered on anti-busing violence in the 1970s, the research will inform the final chapter of Billups’ dissertation, titled “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955–1976.” Drs. Joseph Crespino and Allen Tullos advise Billups’ dissertation.
2022 honors student Annie Fang Li has received a Marshall Scholarship for postgraduate study at the University of Oxford. She wrote her honors thesis with Dr. Chris Suh on “San Francisco Chinatown to the American South: Chinese American Christians in the Civil Rights Movement, 1963-1966.” Annie did a double major in History & Sociology. There are many professors who enriched her time at Emory, including her Honors Thesis committee members, Dr. Suh, Dr. Carol Anderson, & Dr. Helen Jin Kim (Candler School of Theology). In addition, she is grateful to Dr. Tracy L. Scott (Sociology), Dr. Pamela Hall (Religion), and Dr. Tehila Sasson (History). Courses with Dr. Anderson (Civil Rights Movement) and Dr. Suh (Asian-American History) led Annie to declare a major in History.
Annie held a James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race & Difference Undergraduate Honors Fellowship to support her thesis writing. During her time in college, Annie served as founding Editor-in-Chief of Emory In Via, a journal of Christian thought. As an IDEAS fellow, she was the Communications Fellow and Teaching Assistant for two sidecar classes. She was also involved in Residence Life, Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Activists (APIDAA), and Journey Church of Atlanta.
Graduate student Robert Billups has received the Wardlaw Fellowship for Texas Studies from Baylor University Libraries. The fellowship provides up to $1,500 to a visiting scholar or researcher who wishes to use the holdings of Baylor’s Texas Collection. Billups will conduct three weeks of research that will inform his dissertation, “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955–1976,” as well as a future article about international patterns of antisemitism.
Graduate Student Olivia Cocking recently received a doctoral fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. The generous multi-year fellowships “support high-calibre students engaged in doctoral programs in the social sciences and humanities.” Cocking’s work centers on the history of women and gender in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, particularly how gender shapes experiences of urban life. Drs. Judith A. Miller and Elizabeth Goodstein serve as Cocking’s dissertation supervisors.
