Graduate student Robert Billups has received a Lynn E. May Study Grant to support research at the Southern Baptist History Library and Archives in Nashville, TN. Billups received the same grant in 2020 to support work on an article project. The upcoming research will directly inform Billups’s dissertation, “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955–1976,” which investigates violence against participants in the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Congratulations, Robert!
Category / Grants and Fellowships
History Major Edina Hartstein Wins Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad
Congratulations to junior History Major Edina Hartstein on winning a George P. Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad for Summer 2022 travel to London for her Honors thesis. She will also be a Halle Institute Undergraduate Global Research Fellow. Her working title is “The League of Nations’ Advisory Committee on Trafficking in Women & Children: The British Empire’s Role & Impact.”
Hartstein writes that “The first history class I took, ‘Hist 190: Fake News,’ introduced me to the History Department. Not only did I learn a lot, but I built relationships that are still important to me. I met Dr. Judith A. Miller, who later became my major advisor, and pushed me to explore different areas within the field.” Hartstein will work with her thesis advisor, Dr. Tehila Sasson, who taught her “Race and the End of Empire.” That thought provoking class caused Edina to reconsider her understandings of empire, which has been critical for the development of her thesis.
Webster Selected as Dissertation Fellow for Mellon Seminar ‘Visions of Slavery’
Congratulations to graduate student Anjuli Webster on being selected as a dissertation fellow for Emory’s upcoming Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Visions of Slavery: Histories, Memories, and Mobilizations of Unfreedom in the Black Atlantic.” Funded by a $225,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the seminar will bring together scholars at Emory and Atlanta-area universities to examine the “manifold ways slavery in the Black Atlantic has been archived, interpreted, memorialized, mobilized, and resisted.” Webster’s nine-month fellowship will provide opportunities to participate in planning the seminar, as well as support for conducting research and presenting findings related to the seminar’s central theme. Webster’s dissertation, advised by Drs. Clifton Crais, Mariana P. Candido, and Yanna Yannakakis, is titled “Water’s Power: Ecologies of Sovereignty, Race, and Resistance in south Indianic Africa.”
Amelia Golcheski Wins Dissertation Research Fellowship from UNC’s Wilson Library
Congratulations to graduate student Amelia Golcheski on receiving a Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The $3,500 fellowship will support a one month residency at the Wilson Special Collections Library. Golcheski’s dissertation, advised by Drs. Jason Morgan Ward and Allen Tullos, is titled “Compensating Care: The Professionalization of Women’s Care Labor in Appalachia, 1968-2000.”
History Major Isabel Coyle Wins George P. Cuttino Scholarship
Congratulations to junior History Major Isabel Coyle on winning a George P. Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad. Coyle will conduct research in France for her Honors thesis over the summer of 2022. She will also be a Halle Institute Undergraduate Global Research Fellow. Her working title is “Immigration, Race, and Assimilation in France, 1962-1975.”
She writes that Prof. Judith A. Miller’s “support has helped me so much, and I have such great memories from the French Revolution class as well as the Origins of Capitalism class.” She owes “a lot to Dr. Maria Montalvo, who taught the first history class I ever took at Emory and is one of the reasons I decided to major in history.”
The prize is named for Prof. George Cuttino (1914-1991), who taught at Emory for 32 years. He was a beloved professor and held the Candler Chair in Medieval History. He was a two-time Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and chaired the Emory History Department in the early 1970’s before retiring in 1984.
The summer fellowship recipients will present their research to the department at an event this coming fall semester.
Loren & Gail Starr Award in Experiential Learning Awarded to History Major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo
The Department of History is delighted to award one of the new Loren & Gail Starr Awards in Experiential Learning to Honors student and film studies major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo for the Summer of 2022. She will create short animated film, “Backwards,” about the historical connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and Asian exclusion laws.
Kheyal’s work in stop motion films has been winning praise. Last December, she received the Women in Film and Television Atlanta 2021 Scholarship. Recent projects include “The Great Escape” & “My Bunny’s Story.” Check out her YouTube channel: www.tinyurl.com/KheyalRM.
She writes that “All of the History faculty I have taken classes from have been fantastic!” and praises the department for being so supportive. “It has always encouraged me to draw on my love of film in my historical studies,” she explains. She expressed special thanks to her advisor, Prof. Chris Suh, who has encouraged Kheyal to make films since her first year at Emory. Kheyal notes that “Not only has he taught me so much about Asian American history, but he has taught me how Asian American filmmakers have tacked historical (and current) social and political issues.”
Established in 2022 through a generous donation, the Loren & Gail Starr Award provides summer funding for experiential learning projects proposed by History majors, joint majors, or minors. The Starr Award is intended to support students who wish to use the knowledge and skills they have acquired in history courses to create or participate in projects in settings outside of the classroom. Bold, creative, and off-the-beaten path proposals are encouraged. The only rule is that engagement with the past be central to the experience undertaken by the student. We will offer a second round of these awards in the fall.
We look forward to seeing “Backwards” at the end of the summer! This fall, all of the winners of our summer funding awards will make presentations on their projects and their research experiences to the History Department.
History Major Wittika Chaplet Wins George P. Cuttino Scholarship
Congratulations to junior History Major Wittika Chaplet on winning a George P. Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad. Chaplet will conduct research in France and Burkina Faso for her Honors thesis over the summer of 2022. Her working title is “West African Visions of a Verdant Urban Future: A Microhistory of Burkina Faso’s Urban Gardens.”
She writes that “Dr. Clifton Crais, Dr. Thomas Rogers, Dr. Mariana Candido, & Dr. Susan Gagliardi have been wonderfully supportive through the process of proposing my honor’s thesis.” Moreover, “Dr. Anouar El Younssi supported me from the very beginning of my time at Emory & has been immensely helpful over the past three years.”
The prize is named for Prof. George Cuttino (1914-1991), who taught at Emory for 32 years. He was a beloved professor and held the Candler Chair in Medieval History. He was a two-time Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and chaired the Emory History Department in the early 1970’s before retiring in 1984.
The summer fellowship recipients will present their research to the department at an event this coming fall semester.
Chira Receives NEH Summer Stipend and Postdoc at Harvard
Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of History, has been awarded two external grants to support work on her new project, “In the Plantations’ Shadow: Black Peasants and Land Claims in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spanish Equatorial Guinea, 1850-1950.” Chira received an NEH Summer Stipend for this coming summer and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University for AY 2022-23 to work on the same project. Chira’s first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race Beyond Cuba’s Plantations, was published by Cambridge earlier this year. Congratulations, Professor Chira!
Danielle Lee Wiggins (PhD ’18) Wins ACLS Fellowship
Dr. Danielle Lee Wiggins, Assistant Professor at the California Institute of Technology and a 2018 graduate of the PhD program, has won a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Wiggins is one of sixty scholars nationwide selected for the prestigious ACLS Fellowship, which recognizes outstanding scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The fellowship will support Wiggins’s work on her current manuscript project, titled “The Politics of Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Politics.” Jimmy Carter Professor of History Dr. Joseph Crespino served as Wiggins’s advisor at Emory. Read the abstract of Wiggins’s project below.
“This project examines how black political leaders in Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s managed three challenges associated with the postindustrial urban crisis—crime, family instability, and joblessness— with what this project calls the ‘politics of black excellence.’ This approach entailed the expansion of existing practices of racial uplift into the realm of policy. Adherents sought to discipline black people with policies purported to fortify black communities against the internal threat of ‘black-on-black’ crime, restore the black nuclear family, and cultivate diligent black workers. This study argues that in proposing reform of the self, the family, and black communities as solutions to structural crises, Atlanta’s black political class innovated new modes of black politics and Democratic governance.“
Undergraduate Majors Russell and Walker Among Recipients of Robert T. Jones Scholarships
Congratulations to history majors Channelle Russell and Bryn Walker on receiving Emory’s prestigious Robert T. Jones scholarship. In 2022 four graduating seniors were selected for the scholarship, which supports one year of postgraduate study at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Read the Emory News Center’s short biographical profiles of Russell and Walker below, and check out the other recipients of the awards here.
Channelle Russell
An English and history joint major, with a minor in anthropology, Russell has a deep interest in storytelling.
“From a young age, I have been interested in storytelling as a way to explore and interrogate the world,” Russell says.
Finding her major fields as a sophomore, she pursued a course of study devoted to issues of power, race and gender through scholar-writers such as Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison, among others. “Like me, they are all Black women with a story to share,” Russell says.
A first-generation college student who resides in Atlanta, she plans to undertake a master’s degree in creative writing in prose at the University of St Andrews. Her academic interests were born from “the silences and gaps of the literary canon,” as she sought “the ghosts of Black women.” Her work as an undergraduate allowed her to negotiate herself into the narratives that she wanted to read, and subsequently into the narratives that she wants to create, hallmarks that can be seen through her work as an arts and entertainment writer with the Emory Wheel and as the editor-in-chief of Blackstar* Magazine.
Awarded a Woodruff Dean’s Achievement Scholarship at the end of her first year, she was described by a recommender as having “an expansive intellect, keen wit, compassion, poise and thoughtful perspectives on various issues in the world.” She is currently a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, and her honors thesis investigates gender, sound and slavery in textual representation of Jamaican women.
Bryn Walker
A graduate of Emory’s Oxford College, Walker was described by one of her recommenders as a “delightful person who brings humility, good humor and a mature point of view to all that she undertakes.” A history major who was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 2021, Walker’s research interests relate to the American South, cultural and social movements, public history and historical memory.
She was drawn to undertake a master’s degree in museum and heritage studies because of an interest in the “parallels between memory in the U.S. South, which was part of my undergraduate research focus, and Scottish historical memory. Methodologically, the U.K. has a much more robust tradition of public history and I’d like to expand the possibilities for public history scholarship in the United States.”
A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, the first-generation college student’s time at Emory has been marked by a dedication to service. Currently a research ambassador for Emory College’s Undergraduate Research Program, Walker has also spent time on both the Oxford College and Emory College Honor Councils, helped new students acclimate to Emory as a two-time orientation leader and was a diversity ambassador for Oxford College’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
Issues of diversity have played a significant role in Walker’s research experiences to date, including work on country-level migration policy responses to COVID-19, and a 10-week research fellowship studying Confederate monuments in Georgia and tracing the Georgia United Daughters of the Confederacy’s relationship to state government officials.
Beyond Emory, her public history focus has resulted in two internship experiences, one as an interpretive intern with the National Parks Service at Mount Rushmore National Park and the other with the Teaching with Primary Sources Program at the Library of Congress.