Category / Publications

by emoryhistorydept

‘Since Time Immemorial’ Wins AHA’s Katz Prize


Congratulations to Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, whose most recent book, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press, 2023), has won the prestigious Friedrich Katz Prize from the American Historical Association. The Katz Prize is given annually to the best book published in English focusing on Latin America. Since Time Immemorial, Yannakakis writes, “traces the invention, translation, and deployment of the legal category of Native custom, with particular attention to how Indigenous litigants and colonial authorities refashioned social and cultural norms related to marriage, crime, religion, land, labor, and self-governance in Native communities.” The book is available open access from Duke UP. Yannakakis is Department Chair and Professor of History. Read the book abstract below and learn more about the Katz Prize.

In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities, parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures. Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend with historical change and produce new rights for the future.

by emoryhistorydept

Jill Rosenthal (PhD, ’14) Wins CUNY Award for Outstanding Research


Dr. Jill Rosenthal, a 2014 alumnus and now Associate Professor of African History at Hunter College, recently received the 2024 Wasser – Gross Award for Outstanding Research from the City University of New York. The award recognizes academically impressive assistant professors from all CUNY campuses. Awardees present their research as part of the Feliks Gross and Henry Wasser lecture series. Rosenthal’s research focuses on migration, identity, and international aid in the African Great Lakes region, with a focus on the legacy of colonial borders. Duke UP published her first book, From Migrants to Refugees: The Politics of Aid along the Tanzania-Rwanda Border, last year.


Rosenthal completed her graduate work under the advisement of Dr. Clifton Crais. Read more about Rosenthal’s exceptional research and teaching: “Hunter Professor Wins CUNY Award for Outstanding Research.”

by emoryhistorydept

Rodriguez Surveys Recent Research on the Latinx South


Dr. Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of History, recently published a review essay in the Emory-based journal Southern Spaces about the state of research on Latinx histories in the U.S. South. Rodriguez’s piece analyzes how two recent books – Cecilia Márquez’s Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (2023) and Sarah McNamara‘s Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South (2023) – expand simplistic and sometimes exoticizing narratives about Latinx populations in the “Nuevo New South.”


Rodriguez is a historian of US Latinx communities with an emphasis on the US South. Her research examines Latinx experiences in relation to culture, race, ethnicity, labor, and migration. Her current book project, “Mexican Atlanta: Migrant Place-Making in the Latinx South,” traces the history of Metro Atlanta’s ethnic Mexican community formation and broader Latinx connections beginning in the mid-twentieth century.

Read an excerpt from Rodriguez’s Southern Spaces essay below along with the full article here: “Race & Gender in the Latinx South: A Review of Cecilia Márquez’s Making the Latino South & Sarah McNamara’s Ybor City.”

“Márquez and McNamara held a roundtable discussion at the 2023 Southern Historical Association meeting in Charlotte about the shifting terrain of Latinx history. Márquez made a key aspect of Latinx history clear: “when and where you are Latino matters.” Later in the same session McNamara added that, along with generational cohorts, “migration patterns matter.” With the various Latinx migrations to/through southern spaces since the late nineteenth at top of mind, the discussion highlighted the nuances of writing Latinx history from a southern vantage point. The conversation illuminated Chicana historian Vicki Ruiz’s argument that “region is intricately tied to Latina identity.” With attention to geographic and temporal specificities, Márquez’s Making the Latino South and McNamara’s Ybor City each demonstrate how Latina/o/x individuals, families, and communities navigated, understood, and claimed southern spaces over time. With their critical attention to the importance of regional racial formations, histories of racial capitalism, and the varied dimensions (racialized, gendered, generational) of Latinx identities and community formations, Márquez and McNamara have each made contributions that enrich more than two decades of scholarship.”

by emoryhistorydept

Alumni Update: Dr. Rachel M. Johnston-White (BA, 2010)

The History Department was pleased to receive an update from Dr. Rachel M. Johnston-White, a 2010 graduate of Emory College. After graduating with a BA in French and High Honors in History, Johnston-White headed to Yale Graduate School. She completed her doctorate in French History in 2017. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The volume Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe, to which she contributed a chapter, was published with Cambridge University Press this spring. 

Johnston-White also just learned that she has won a one-year Open Competition XS grant from the NWO (Dutch Research Council) to work on a brand-new project on soldiers’ photographs of wartime atrocities, a subject that unfortunately remains all too relevant. Soldiers’ photographs not only shape public opinion, as in the current Israel/Gaza conflict and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also constitute an evidence base for legal action against states and individual perpetrators. Yet soldiers’ unique positionality and its impact on their photography are poorly understood, leaving scholars and the public alike blind to the subjectivity of such photographs. Her project will use an earlier conflict, the Algerian War for independence from France (1954- 1962), to contextualize and compare the photos of soldiers who were participants in or opponents of war atrocities in order to answer the question: does a soldier’s attitude towards war atrocities shape the photographic choices they make, and, if so, how?

Are you an Emory History alum? Please share updates on your life and work with us!

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Webster Co-Edits Special Issue of ‘African Economic History’

Doctoral candidate Anjuli Webster recently co-edited, together with Dr. Ndumiso Dladla of the University of Pretoria, a special issue of the journal African Economic History titled “Economic Sovereignty in South Africa.” Webster also co-authored one of the articles in the issue with Dladla, titled “Who conquered South Africa? Neocolonialism and Economic Sovereignty.” The abstract of their pece is featured below, and the special issue can be accessed via Project MUSE. Webster is currently completing her dissertation, “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in southern Africa, 1750-1900,” under the advisement of Drs. Clifton Crais, Mariana P. Candido, Yanna Yannakakis, and Thomas D. Rogers.

“The right of conquest is a doctrine in the theory of international law in terms of which victory in war entitles the victor both to the title to territory of the vanquished as well as sovereignty over them. Far from being a mere event, however, conquest is an ongoing process, structure, and relation of domination. Despite the widely celebrated “transition to democracy” and the supposed triumph of popular sovereignty in South Africa in the past three decades, we argue that South Africa’s “democratic” constitutional order remains firmly rooted in the dubious right of conquest asserted since the defeat of its indigenous people in the unjust wars of Western colonization, which began in the mid-seventeenth century. In this article we critically reflect on South African historiography by asking “Who conquered South Africa”? The question is necessary because sovereign power is both misunderstood and obfuscated in South African contemporary history and public discourse. We argue that conquest, and its attendant concepts of sovereignty and war, are deliberately underemphasized in South African historiography despite being at the root of problems regarding economic sovereignty. Our argument considers the problem of succession to conquest, in terms of which both the title to territory and sovereignty over the conquered is transferred from the conqueror to another party who then enjoys these entitlements and powers. We trace various successors in title to Conquest South Africa, and show that their economic power originates in the right of conquest. Their ownership of South Africa’s natural resources originates in the title to territory acquired through its disseisin following the conquest of the indigenous people, and in the same way their continued de facto sovereignty over that population now takes the form of the wanton and relentless exploitation of their labor power.“

by emoryhistorydept

New Books Series: Q&A with Maria R. Montalvo about ‘Enslaved Archives’


Dr. Maria R. Montalvo, Assistant Professor of History, recently published her first book, Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past, with Johns Hopkins University Press. The book explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Associate Professor of History at UC-Berkeley, described Montalvo’s work as “a profound ‘history within a history’ of slavery” and “a welcome, necessary addition to the study of the American slave trade.”

In the Q&A below, Dr. Montalvo gives us a glimpse into the making of the monograph as part of the History Department’s New Faculty Publications series.

Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.

I started working on my book, in the form of a dissertation, in graduate school. If we count from the first time I set foot in the archive, then I started trying to figure out what I was going to write about in 2014. I like to think that I found my project in the archive, specifically, the New Orleans Public Library, which houses civil and criminal court records from New Orleans between 1803 and the 1920s. When I arrived, I knew I was interested in finding warranty disputes that centered on enslaved individuals, but I had no idea what it would take to find exactly what I was looking for or how my project would change during the looking. I don’t remember a specific lightbulb moment, when I knew exactly what I was doing or where it was all going. I remember a lot of little moments, alone with the lawsuits I’d found, in the library with friends and colleagues, or in my advisor’s office, when smaller things started to click and ideas began to come together. The book bears my name alone, but I did not write or conceive of it by myself. In the ten-year lifespan of putting this thing together, I’ve been able to lean on mentors, friends, editors, and colleagues. I couldn’t have written the book, or finally decided it was finished, on my own.

What was the research process like?

The research process was intense and time consuming. I looked through over 18,000 sets of civil court records while also trying to create a new, more efficient way of interacting with these sources. Sifting through thousands of court records took a lot of time and effort, as did closely reading the relevant ones and working to make sense of them. The result of all that time and effort is miles of notes and diary entries wherein my analysis began to take shape. Looking back, I’m glad I wrote down as much as I did about my process. It helped when it came to thinking through things, remembering what I’d seen in the archive, and of course, writing.

Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?

I think I’m partial to chapter one, which is and is not about an enslaved child named John. When I wrote my dissertation, I overlooked John, mentioning him, I think, 6 times in a chapter that he was not at the center of. I unwittingly brushed him aside in the interest of telling a more detailed story. And once I realized what I’d done, I wanted to see what it would mean to put John—someone who we find and lose in a single contract—at the center of his own history. The end result is not something that generates new biographical information about John, that’s unfortunately something we can’t do. But it is something that gets us closer to making sense of the world he lived in and the choices he may have believed he had.

How does this project align with your broad research agenda?

As a historian, I’m motivated by questions about how power is created, used, and preserved over time. My book centers on exploring the relationship between the production of enslaved property and violence, both historical and archival. In that way, it’s about the origins and extent of enslavers’ power over the people they enslaved. On the horizon, I see myself continuing to interrogate archival production as a means of understanding the entanglements of race, capitalism, and the freedom in the nineteenth-century United States.  

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Lal in TIME: “What a Mughal Princess Can Teach Us About Feminist History”


Dr. Ruby Lal, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently author an article in TIME, “What a Mughal Princess Can Teach Us About Feminist History.” Lal’s piece centers on her latest book, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale, 2023), which chronicles the life of Princess Gulbadan, a fascinating figure who travelled widely and authored the sole extant work of prose by a woman in the early decades of the Mughal Empire. Lal’s article also addresses the marginalization of feminist and women’s histories, both in Gulbadan’s time and our own. Read an excerpt from the TIME article below along with the full article. Also listen to an interview with Lal on WABE’s City Lights.

“Books and chronicles from centuries past are precious gifts. Holding onto their words, we can delve into the beauty and torments of human life. With such rare possessions, we come close to another time; watch her creation, her uncertainties, her discoveries, the stuff of history. But uncovering feminist history is a slow process, and too often, women historians are the only ones willing to do that work. Beveridge taught herself Persian to reveal Gulbadan’s history. I have spent years combining hundreds of documents to assemble the adventures of daring and imaginative Mughal women.”

by emoryhistorydept

PhD Candidate Anjuli Webster Publishes Articles in Journals of African and World History


African history graduate student Anjuli Webster has published two new articles drawing on her doctoral research. The first, a short piece titled “Water and History in Southern Africa,” was published as an Open Access “History Matters” contribution in the Journal of African History. The second article, titled “Inter-Imperial Entanglement: The British Claim to Portuguese Delagoa Bay in the Nineteenth Century,” appeared in the Journal of World History. Webster wrote the original version of this article in the graduate student seminar (HIST 584) and under the supervision of Drs. Clifton Crais and Jason Morgan Ward. Webster thanks the Research Workshop in History at Emory for support in the process of revisions and the History PhD program for funding image reproduction fees.

Webster’s dissertation, “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in southern Africa, 1750-1900,” explores transformations in sovereignty and ecology in southern Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries. She has won many grants for her research, including from the American Society for Environmental History, Harvard Center for History and Economics, the Luso-American Development Foundation, and Emory’s “Visions of Slavery” Mellon Sawyer Seminar.

by emoryhistorydept

Alumni Update: Ashleigh Dean Ikemoto (Ph.D., ’16)

Dr. Ashleigh Dean Ikemoto, a 2016 alum of the doctoral program, recently sent an update on her career trajectory since graduating from Emory. As she discusses below, Dean recently published her first book, Pedro de Alfaro & the Struggle for Power in the Globalized Pacific, 1565-1644 (Rowman & Littlefield, Lexington Books). The book derives from her dissertation, which was advised by Dr. Tonio Andrade. Enjoy Ashleigh’s update below!

“Since finishing my PhD, I taught at Monmouth College in New Jersey and at Gordon State College in Georgia before beginning at Georgia College in 2018. My doctoral research was on Spain’s frustrated attempts to conquer Ming Dynasty China. This year I published a book based on my dissertation. It examines the career of Pedro de Alfaro (d. 1580), a Spanish Franciscan whose illegal entry into China sparked a chain of events that contributed to the development of an interconnected Pacific economic and diplomatic maritime zone.

“I am still engaged in the field of early modern history and still teach East Asian history, but I currently spend most of my time working on food history. I teach courses on the historical methodology of foodways, Asian and Asian-American food, Jewish food, Mediterranean food, and the history of alcohol.

“Beginning in January 2023, I will be Co-Director of Georgia College’s Global Foodways Program, which provides an undergraduate certificate and opportunities for community outreach and study abroad. I have also done two research fellowships in pursuit of food-related research and pedagogy: one in Mongolia as a Henry Luce Foundation American Center for Mongolian Studies Field School participant in 2022, and one this past summer as a Brandeis University Schusterman Center for Israeli Studies Fellow in Israeli & the West Bank.

“My time at Emory prepared me to see history as a universally-applicable discipline, letting me branch out beyond my dissertation research and broadening my perspective as an educator.”

Are you an Emory History alumnus? Please send us updates on your life and work!

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Johanna Luthman (PhD ’04) Publishes New Book with Oxford UP

Why would a woman falsely accuse her husband’s youthful step-grandmother of attempting to murder her with a poisoned enema? Dr. Johanna Luthman, Professor of History at the University of North Georgia, first learned of this accusation, which took place at the court of James I of England in 1618, while she was writing her dissertation at Emory. Now, she has explored the question fully in her new book, Family and Feuding at the Court of James I: The Lake and Cecil Scandals (Oxford UP). The sensational accusation was one of many levied between the families of Sir Thomas Lake, Secretary of State, and Thomas Cecil, Earl of Exeter, both members of the king’s Privy Council and at the pinnacle of power at the Jacobean court. The two families were joined by the marriage of Sir Thomas’s daughter Anne to Exeter’s grandson William Cecil, Lord Roos. The souring of that marriage led to a years-long feud between the families, which caused sensational scandals, political downfalls, international man-hunts, and lengthy trials where King James himself sat as a judge, a Biblical Solomon dispensing justice. This is the first detailed account of the Lake and Cecil feud. It provides a window into Jacobean society, politics, religion, medicine, ideas about gender and sexuality, and more.