Category / Public Scholarship

by abritt

Graduate Students Alexander Cors and Shari Wejsa Publish Blog Entries for HASTAC

Second-year graduate students Alexander Cors and Shari Wejsa are the two 2017-18 HASTAC Scholars at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Cors and Wejsa recently published entries on the blog of HASTAC, which stands for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. Check out links to their recent posts and read their HASTAC biographies below.

Alexander Cors

My research interests broadly encompass transatlantic history in the early modern period, from 1450 to 1850. Geographically, my focus is on Latin America and Europe. I am particularly interested in colonial Louisiana, the circum-Caribbean, and Bourbon Spain.

My current project investigates migration and settlement patterns, immigration policies, and discourses on foreigners in eighteenth-century Louisiana. I am particularly concerned with questions of ethnicity, integration, and identity in the early modern transatlantic empires of France and Spain. I am also interested in Digital Humanities, especially the use of GIS technology to create ethnolinguistic maps of the eighteenth-century Mississippi Valley.

Shari Wejsa 

As a PhD student in Latin American history, I study the experiences of Angolan and Mozambican immigrants and refugees in Brazil in the postcolonial period. I examine how their migratory experiences have shaped their identities as they adapted to Brazil while remaining connected to their countries of origin. I also explore how international human rights law and evolving immigration policies have affected the lives of these migrants. My research interests are an extension of my Fulbright Commission-sponsored work on Brazil’s National Truth Commission, which investigated the human rights violations committed during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985), and the inequities of educational access for Afro-Brazilian girls and women in Bahia. As an educator, I seek to cultivate critical thinking on issues of human rights and social justice while advocating for active engagement as transformative power.

by abritt

Lesser on Ancestry and DNA Testing in ‘The Atlanta Journal Constitution”

History Department Chair Jeffrey Lesser recently commented on the expanding use of DNA tests to chart an individuals’ ancestry in The Atlanta Journal Constitution. The article, titled “Do popular DNA tests like 23andMe, Ancestry actually work?” explores the motivations for taking these tests and the results they provide. Lesser, a specialist in immigration and ethnicity, asserted that “There are lots of different ways of understanding heritage. I think as historians, we’re interested in why people believe what they do, which is quite different than saying that people are something.” Read the full article here.

by abritt

Crespino in ‘The Wall Street Journal’: “Who Is the Real Atticus Finch?”

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History, wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal entitled “Who is the Real Atticus Finch?” The piece explores competing interpretations of Harper Lee’s protagonist as a champion of justice or racist in the context of an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway. Crespino is the author of  Atticus Finch: The Biography — Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon (Basic Books, 2018).  Read the full piece (paywall protected) here.

by abritt

History Alumnus Preston Hogue Publishes Honors Thesis on ‘Atlanta Studies’

History alumnus Preston Hogue recently published a revised version of his undergraduate honors thesis on Atlanta Studies. The multimedia piece is entitled, “The Tie that Binds: White Church Response to Neighborhood Racial Change in Atlanta, 1960-1985.” Hogue graduated with highest honors as a joint major in Religion and History in Spring 2013.

by abritt

LaChance and Palomino are Featured Participants at Emory-wide Interdisciplinary Humanities Conference

On March 26th Emory University will host a campus-wide event on the roles of the interdisciplinary humanities and liberal arts at Emory and the future of the interdisciplinary humanities in higher education and society more broadly. Featured participants include President Claire E. Sterk, Provost Dwight A. McBride, Earl Lewis, the outgoing President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Mariët Westermann, the Executive Vice President of the Mellon Foundation. History faculty Daniel LaChance and Pablo Palomino (a historian at Emory Oxford), both Mellon Faculty Fellows, are featured participants at the conference. Read more about the conference and other participants here.

by abritt

$300,000 Mellon Grant Supports Updates and Expansions to ‘Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database’

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship a $300,000 grant to support the updating and expansion of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Robert W. Woodruff Emeritus Professor of History David Elits and Professor of History Allen E. Tullos are co-directors of the project. The funding will specifically fund the development of “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade” (PAST), a new feature of the database and website focused on the biographies of historical figures linked to the slave trade. Read more about the grant at the Emory News Center.

by abritt

Patrick N. Allitt Featured on ‘History News Network’

History News Network Features Editor Yoni Anijar recently profiled Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, in an article titled “The Historian Who Denies Climate Change? Not so Fast.” The piece discusses (and refutes) accusations that Allitt is a denier of climate change, a misreading of his recent work A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (Penguin, 2014). Read the full piece here.

by abritt

Daniel LaChance on Racism, the Death Penalty, and ‘Black Mirror’ in ‘The Washington Post’

Assistant Professor of History Daniel LaChance recently penned an article for The Washington Post’s “Made by History” section. LaChance is an expert on law and American culture. Read the article, titled “How ‘Black Mirror’ exposes the racist reality of the death penalty in America,” and also see LaChance’s Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

by abritt

Dr. Carol Anderson Presents John F. Morgan Sr. Distinguished Faculty Lecture for Emory Founders Week

We are sorry to announce that today’s Distinguished Faculty Lecture has been cancelled since the main speaker, Dr. Carol Anderson, is incapacitated by the flu.  The lecture will be re-scheduled soon.  Stay tuned.

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies, will present the John F. Morgan Sr. Distinguished Faculty Lecture this year as a part of Emory Founders Week. Anderson is an historian and affiliated faculty in the Department of History. At the event on Tuesday, February 6 she will speak about her most recent and acclaimed work,  White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016). Read more about the event at the Emory News Center.

by abritt

Allen Tullos on Alabama’s Special Senate Election in ‘El País’ (Spain)

Professor of History Allen Tullos recently commented on the special senate election in Alabama for an article in Spain’s largest newspaper, El País. Tullos, who also serves as the Senior Editor of Southern Spaces and Co-Director of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, is the author of Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Amanda Mars authored the piece, “Por qué el viejo sur dio la espalda a los republicanos.” See the excerpt below and read the full article.

“Alabama arrastra una larga y vergonzosa historia de falta de apoyo a la educación pública que resulta en una postura reaccionaria y desinformada a las políticas de raza, de género o de bienestar social y, por supuesto, persiste un racismo blanco que cae muy fácilmente en la demagogia de políticos como George Wallace, Donald Trump o Roy Moore”, afirma Allen Tullos, historiador de la Universidad de Emory.