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!
Category / Grants and Fellowships
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.
Strocchia Awarded Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton)
Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History and Department Chair, was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for the Fall of 2022. As a member of the School of Historical Studies, Strocchia will continue work on her new book project, “Health for Sale: Marketing Medical Trust in Late Renaissance Italy.”
Senior History Major Annie Li Wins Prestigious Marshall Scholarship
Congratulations to senior Annie Li, a history and sociology double major, on being selected for the prestigious Marshall Scholarship. Li is one of 41 students selected nationwide for the award, which supports up to three years of graduate study at any institution in the U.K. As the Emory News Report explains, “Li will pursue a master’s of philosophy with a focus on Christian ethics at the University of Oxford, researching the theological motivations behind transnational social movements. The work expands on her honors thesis, which examines the motivations of Chinese-American activists from San Francisco’s Presbyterian Church in Chinatown (PCC) who participated in the Civil Rights Movement in the South and the Asian American Movement in the West.” Li’s honors thesis, “Chinese-American Christians in the Civil Rights Movement, 1963-1968,” was advised by Dr. Chris Suh, Assistant Professor of History. Read more about Li’s award here: “Emory senior Annie Li selected as a Marshall Scholar for study in U.K.”
“Visions of Slavery,” Co-Organized by Walter C. Rucker, Awarded Prestigious Mellon Foundation Grant
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory College a $225,000 grant for a year-long investigation of the histories of unfreedom in the Black Atlantic. The grant will support a symposium titled “Visions of Slavery,” which is co-organized by Dr. Walter C. Rucker, Professor of History, and Bayo Holsey, Associate Professor of Anthropology. The event will take place as a part of Mellon’s 2022-2023 Sawyer Seminar series and involve faculty from other university campuses across Atlanta. History Department faculty Mariana Candido and Adriana Chira are part of the working group for the seminar. Read more about the symposium via the Emory News Center as well as the Department of African American Studies.
Patterson Appointed Distinguished Visiting Humanities Professor at Agnes Scott College
Dr. Cynthia Burchell Patterson, Professor of History and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, has been appointed the Dabney Adams Hart Distinguished Visiting Humanities Professor at Agnes Scott College for Spring 2022. The Dabney Adams Hart Distinguished Visiting Humanities Professorship was established in 2003 by Madeline and Howell E. Adams, Jr. in honor of his sister, Dabney Hart ’48. This fund welcomes visiting scholars to campus in a variety of topics and disciplines.
Honors Students Present Summer 2021 Thesis Research
On Friday, Sept. 17, 2021, the department of history held its first in-person undergraduate event since March 2020. At this event, five history honors students – Ellie Coe, Sarah Gordon, Carson Greene, Willie Lieberman, and Channelle Russell – delivered presentations about the thesis research they conducted during Summer 2021. This research was made possible with history department funding provided through the George P. Cuttino Scholarship, Theodore H. Jack Award, James L. Roark Prize, and Bell I. Wiley Prize.
PhD Candidate Stephanie Bryan Named ECDS Digital Humanities Fellow
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.
Suddler Named OAH Distinguished Lecturer
Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor of History, has been named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. The OAH’s Distinguished Lectureship Program is a speakers bureau comprised of nearly 600 historians dedicated to sharing American history. Read the OAH’s biography of Suddler below, and find out more about the other 22 scholars selected for this year’s cohort.
Carl Suddler is an assistant professor of history at Emory University. His publications, teaching, and public scholarship have placed him among a small number of African American scholars who study the intersections of Black life, crime, and sports since the late nineteenth century. Suddler’s first book, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (2019) is widely used in college and graduate classrooms across the country. He joined historians of the American carceral state who have produced a burgeoning wave of literature on criminalization, law enforcement, and imprisonment in America from the eras of slavery and settler colonialism to the modern age of mass incarceration and global counterinsurgency. In addition to his monograph, Suddler has published works that have appeared in the Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, American Studies Journal, Journal of Sports History; in 2020, he edited a special issue of The American Historian magazine that historically contextualized the global protests that occurred in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others; and in 2021, Suddler worked with Harvard University’s Global Sports Initiative to help professional athletes become more informed on how to maximize their platforms to contribute to social justice efforts across the globe. With his recent op-eds and articles in outlets such as the Washington Post, Bleacher Report, HuffPost, and Brookings Institute, Suddler has built a name for himself outside of the academy. His expertise is in high demand from scholarly communities and media outlets such as CNN, ABC News, Al Jazeera, Black News Channel, and NPR.