Category / Public Scholarship

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Lipstadt Receives Exemplary Teacher Award

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Congratulations to Dr. Deborah Lipstadt on receiving Emory’s 2020 Exemplary Teacher Award (formerly known as the Scholar/Teacher Award) for transformational teaching and public scholarship. Lipstadt is Associated Faculty in the History Department and Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies in the Department of Religion and The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. The award is one of the top honors given to faculty at Emory.

Michael A. Elliott, dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences and Charles Howard Candler Professor of English, nominated Lipstadt for the award, writing: “As an historian, public intellectual, teacher and mentor, her tireless commitment to scholarly rigor and to social justice are expressed in her astonishing level of service to the university, and to the broader community, all of which she models to her students.” Read a full profile of Listadt, authored by the Emory News Center’s Kimber Williams, here: “Lipstadt receives Exemplary Teacher Award for transformational teaching and public scholarship.”

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Yannakakis and Premo Discuss Law, its Spaces, and its Practitioners in Colonial Mexico and Peru

Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Associate Professor of History, recently published a conversation about law in colonial Latin America with Dr. Bianca Premo, Professor of History at Florida International University. Their piece is published as a part of the History and the Law Project within the Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas Programme. The conversation includes discussion of Yannakakis’s digital project, “Power of Attorney,” which we featured in 2018: “Recent Faculty Publications: Q & A with Yanna Yannakakis about ‘Power of Attorney.’”

Read the piece by Yannakakis and Premo here: “On not going to court in colonial Spanish America: A conversation between Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis.”

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Strocchia’s FYS, ‘Epidemics in History,’ Brings Historical Insights to Unfolding Pandemic

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, is teaching a first-year seminar titled “Epidemics in History” this spring. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the course far more timely than she or the students anticipated. The Emory News Center featured “Epidemics in History” among Emory courses where professors and students are using the pandemic as a learning opportunity. Read about all of those courses in their article, “COVID-19 in Class.” Strocchia also offered comments on her original idea for the class and how she modified it in order to investigate this historical moment in real time. Read her comments below.

My freshman seminar this semester, “Epidemics in History,” was not designed to coincide with a global pandemic. I did plan to end the course with a study of the 1918 influenza epidemic after examining the Black Death and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks. Our goal was to explore the historical and biological effects of urbanization, environmental change, and the human connectivity resulting from faster modes of transportation. But I also wanted to raise issues of preparedness with my students, many of who planned careers in medicine and science. It seemed oddly serendipitous that the Wuhan outbreak of coronavirus hit the headlines just as spring semester started. At our first class meeting in January, we decided that tracking its progression would make a good class project. Relying on trusted news outlets, we learned the value of social distancing, good hand hygiene, and flattening the curve. Week by week, the news grew more startling but still seemed far from home. By the time spring break arrived, though, COVID-19 already had an official name and the world was on the verge of pandemic. We’ve since modified our syllabus to make direct comparisons between the experiences of 1918 and our own day, looking at public health policies, frontline healers, issues of fear and resilience. It’s been a rewarding but sobering experience—one that shows there’s much to be learned about health and society from studying the past.

– Sharon Strocchia

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Daniel Thomas (20C), History Major and Fox Center Honors Fellow, Writes About Separatism in Eastern Ukraine

Daniel Thomas, a senior double major in history and international studies, recently wrote a piece about his research on separatism in Eastern Ukraine for the blog of the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory. Thomas is a 2019-’20 Fox Center Humanities Honors Fellow, completing his honors thesis with a regional focus on the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. The thesis draws on archival research and interviews that Thomas conducted in Kyiv in 2019. Associate Professor Matthew Payne is Thomas’ adviser. Read an excerpt from the post on the Fox Center’s blog below along with the full piece: “Neighbors against Neighbors: A historical study of separatist groups and rhetoric in Eastern Ukraine.”

The Fox Center’s generous grant has afforded me both the privilege of working in a tightly-knit epistemic community and the ability to conduct further research into my topic. The lump sum that I received as a part of my fellowship helped fund my interview-collecting over the Winter Break in Kyiv. Hearing the lived experiences of the Donbas’ denizens contributed a great deal to this project. I spoke with refugees and former separatist affiliates who dealt first-hand with the destructive repercussions of Donbasian separatism. Their accounts and lives illustrated that identity is more of a practice in subjectivity than it is an objective truth. Although my interviewees admitted that the separatist cause was rooted in a real problem (the callousness many politicians, both in Eastern and Western Ukraine, had towards the poor), they also admit that the separatists’ cause did little to ameliorate the Donbas’ desperate situation. Instead, it amplified it, displacing millions upon millions of Donbasians from their homeland. Without their insight, this thesis would have been at best a clueless meditation on a “forgotten” conflict…

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Rogers and Manuel Publish Op-Ed in ‘The Brazilian Report’

Thomas D. Rogers, Arthur Blank/NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History, recently published an opinion editorial with his collaborator Jeffrey T. Manuel in The Brazilian Report. The piece, titled “U.S. ethanol industry should take a leaf out of São Paulo’s book,” explores how ethanol policy and programs in São Paulo, Brazil, could inform energy administration in the United States. Rogers and Manuel are writing a transnational study of ethanol policy in Brazil and the U.S. Read the full article (paywall protected): “U.S. ethanol industry should take a leaf out of São Paulo’s book.”

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Crespino Reviews Mitchell’s ‘Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era’ for the ‘Wall Street Journal’

Dr. Joseph Crespino, History Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor of History, recently published a review article in the Wall Street Journal. Crespino’s article centers on the new book by journalist Jerry Mitchell, who, beginning in the late 1980s, launched a series of investigations that would re-open four of the most infamous acts of Southern racist violence from the 1960s. Mitchell published the book, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era, with Simon & Schuster in early February 2020. Read an excerpt from Crespino’s review below, along with the full piece (paywall restricted): “‘Race Against Time’ Review: A Reporter for Justice.”

“Race Against Time” provides a sobering view of white-supremacist politics. The power that social media now provides white-nationalist groups to spread their hatred makes the tactics of earlier generations look quaint. Weeks before Beckwith’s final retrial was scheduled to begin, fliers appeared in the driveways of hundreds of Mississippi homes describing him as a political prisoner. Mr. Mitchell traced the fliers back to Beckwith himself, who had paid some $1,000 to have them printed and distributed. Imagine by comparison the scale of disinformation and intimidation that far-right groups spread today via social media.

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Jason Morgan Ward Speaks on C-SPAN Panel ‘Reinterpreting Southern History’

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Dr. Jason Morgan Ward, Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies, recently contributed to a panel on C-SPAN about new approaches to understanding the history of the South. The panel, which took place at the 2019 Southern Historical Association annual meeting, included Ward along with other authors from the upcoming edited volume Reinterpreting Southern Histories: Essays in Historiography (LSU Press, 2020). Find video of the full panel at “Reinterpreting Southern History.”

 

 

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Rogers and Collaborator Manuel Publish Opinion Piece in ‘The Hill’ on Ethanol Policy in the U.S. and Brazil

Associate Professor Thomas D. Rogers recently co-authored an opinion piece in The Hill with collaborator Jeffrey T. Manuel, Associate Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The article examines ethanol policy in the United States and Brazil, the two largest ethanol-producing countries in the world, with a focus on the powerful multiparty blocs of legislators that steer policy in both countries. Rogers and Manuel are writing a transnational history of biofuels in the United States and Brazil. Read an excerpt from the piece below along with the full article: “Who is driving our ethanol policy? And why does it matter?”

“When a government treats energy sources and fuels individually, organized groups like the rural blocs can capture policymaking. Instead, the United States and Brazil should pursue comprehensive national energy policies that prioritize decarbonization. This would diminish agribusiness’s influence over policymaking and move us toward a distributed and diverse energy system.”

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Elizabeth Stice (PhD, 2012) Describes Assigning One Text for the Entire Semester in “Inside Higher Ed”

Dr. Elizabeth Stice, a 2012 PhD alumna and Associate Professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University, recently authored an article in Inside Higher Ed on taking a different approach to assigned readings in her courses. In a humanities course that typically covers from 1700 through the present, Stice opted to use only one text for the entire semester: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Read about the mostly positive results of the experiment in Stice’s Inside Higher Ed article: “When Less Is More in the Classroom.” Stice completed her dissertation, “Empire Between the Lines: Constructions of Empire in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War,” under the advisement of Associate Professor of History Kathryn E. Amdur.

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Crespino Writes Op-Ed for ‘The New York Times’: “The Democrats Are in Georgia. The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher.”

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor of History, authored an opinion piece in The New York Times last month on the day of the democratic presidential primary debate held here in Atlanta. In the article, “The Democrats Are in Georgia. The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher,” Crespino provides historical context for democratic optimism that Georgia could turn blue in the 2020 election. Crespino’s most recent book is Atticus Finch: The Biography (Basic Books, 2018). Read an excerpt of The New York Times article below along with the full piece: “The Democrats Are in Georgia. The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher.”

“In many ways, American politics today resemble an earlier era in Southern history, when candidates who only a few years before their election had been dismissed as jokes or nobodies stoked reactionary impulses to win the highest office in the state. That’s what happened in Georgia in 1966 when Lester Maddox, a folksy restaurateur and longtime failed candidate, was elected governor. After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, forcing the desegregation of public accommodations in the South, Maddox leapt to public prominence by wielding an ax handle to chase away African-Americans who attempted to eat at his restaurant. He attracted the same voters that George Wallace won in neighboring Alabama — white Southerners embittered by social and political changes that they felt were being forced upon them by sanctimonious, out-of-touch elites.”