Category / Publications

by emoryhistorydept

New Faculty Books Series: Q&A with Ellie R. Schainker about ‘Rites of Empire’


Dr. Ellie R. Schainker, Arthur Blank Family Foundation Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, recently published her second book, Rites of Empire: Reforming Judaism in Imperial Russia, with Oxford University Press. In the latest installment of our New Faculty Books Q&A series, Dr. Schainker below provides us with a glimpse into the making of Rites of Empire.

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

The idea for this book came while I was writing my first book on the history and politics of Jewish conversions in the Russian empire.  Two tantalizing references to Reform Judaism came up in my research.  First, I came across a file in the Ministry of the Interior’s archive in St. Petersburg in which a Reform Jew from Austria sought baptism, and an imperial official asked if the state recognized Reform Judaism as a Jewish “sect” and if there were Reform Jews in the empire.  Second, I researched several Christianizing Jewish sects in southern Ukraine that emerged in the turbulent pogrom period of the 1880s which sparked a heated debate in the Russian Jewish press whether the groups should be classified as religious reformers or Christian missionaries.  Both references made me think about the role of religious reforms in imperial governance of ethno-confessional minorities, and the relationship between conversion and reform of colonized subjects.

I started researching Rites of Empire during a 2014 research trip to Russia while I was finishing up the research and writing of my first book.  I made the final edits on this book in June 2025.  Indeed, decade is the right measurement for book production.  In that time, I conducted research in archives and libraries in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Israel.  Two workshop invitations in 2020 during COVID helped me transition from research and conference paper mode to drafting manuscript chapters.  The real press to complete a full manuscript was afforded by a full year fellowship at the Fox Center in 2023-24 that allowed me to write full time.


What was the research process like?

Although I’m an archive junkie, I made a commitment early on to not just make this an imperial story of reforming Jews and Judaism, but to really investigate Jews’ own commitment to religious reform and the preservation of religion.  Aside from investigating the archive of imperial intervention into Jewish religious life, I explored internal Jewish sources on self-modernization and how many Russian Jews from the 1840s to 1917 actively sought a synthesis between modern subjectivity and religious Judaism.  I researched Jewish autobiography, literature, the popular press, rabbinic responsa, rabbinic correspondence, and vernacular publications on Jewish religion, pedagogy, choral synagogues, and ritual life.

In the process of researching, I needed to train myself in new scholarly literatures.  I sought professional retooling in the sociology of religion and scholarship on law and religion.  New sociological approaches to secularism extended my work on modern Jewish culture beyond surveying religion and its absence to interrogating ideas, modes, and political implications of regulating the practice of religion in the modern world.  Post-colonial scholarship on law and religion gave me insight into how religion formed the basis for imperial order and exercise of authority. In this way, debates on religion became a key arena for the extension of state power and new forms of individual and communal self-fashioning.  With this second book, I have also moved into the field of legal history.  I have started to share my work at legal studies conferences, and I am teaching a new graduate course in Spring 2027 on Law and Religion.


Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?

I am slightly partial to Chapter 5 on the rise of liberal choral synagogues and modern cantors from Warsaw to Siberia in the late imperial period.  This chapter showcases the DIY approach to Jewish religious reforms and how the story of imperial coercion to reform did not control Jews own internal impulse for reform.  The chapter also led me into the history of music and architecture as well as the aesthetics of religious experience and modernization.  It also tied my work to the material history of imperial Russian Jewry that still dots the landscape of Jewish life in the Former Soviet Union today.  Choral synagogues still exist in places such as St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vilnius, and Minsk, often serving as the only active synagogues in these cities.  While they have been internally remodeled to conform to Orthodox Jewish strictures, their names and architectural design attest to a moment when liberal Judaism was developing across Eastern Europe and Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


How does this project align with your broad research agenda (past, present, or future)?

I’m broadly interested in exploring the social and cultural “margins” of East European Jewish society (or topics that scholars have sidelined) and asking what they can teach us about modern Jewish life.  In my first book, I studied converts who were stigmatized by both Jews and Christians, and yet centering their experiences allowed me to narrate the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia as a profoundly religious drama in which a diverse, alluring, and at times aggressive Christianity attracted many Jews, threatened Jewish communal cohesion, and shaped the defensive behavior and identity of Russian Jewry as a whole.

In my new book, I explore the history of liberal Judaism and religious modernization in East Europe—a part of the modern Jewish world often thought of as highly traditional or ardently secular.  I argue that religious diversity and individual non-conformity shaped notions of Jewish identity in the Russian Empire, and that for a time, the tsarist state was eagerly supportive of Jewish reforms and actively brought liberal Jews into its Jewish bureaucracy.

In my future work, I am interested in bringing together my previous research and current teaching engagements.  In connection to my work on conversion and religious liberalization and my teaching for study abroad on contemporary Jewish life in Poland, I am exploring a book project on new Jews and Jewish renewal in post-communist Eastern Europe and its diaspora.

In the meantime, I’m working on an article on Jewish thought and empire, and a collaborative project on gender, Jewish law, and the practice of legal pluralism. 

by emoryhistorydept

Doctoral Student Becca Aponte Publishes Two-Part Series in AHA’s ‘Perspectives’


Third-year doctoral student Becca Aponte (African history) has published a pair of articles in the American Historical Association’s newsmagazine Perspectives on History. Aponte’s columns examine the theme “Africa, Women, and the Global History of Capitalism” through contemporary and historical commerce and culture in Dakar, Senegal.

The columns intersect with Aponte’s research in French West Africa, which (as she describes) examines “how women constructed alternative regimes of property, credit, and commerce across a century of imperial expansion in rural Senegal – from the abolition of slavery to the dismantling of colonial subjecthood.” Aponte’s graduate work is advised by Professors Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais.

Read about Aponte and the other summer 2026 Perspectives columnists here, and find links to her two columns:

“Capitalism at Ground Level”

By Becca Aponte
Published July 30, 2026

“Small Property, Big Meanings”

By Becca Aponte
Published September 15, 2026

by emoryhistorydept

Andrew G. Britt (PhD, ’18) Publishes ‘I’ll Samba Someplace Else’ with Duke UP


Dr. Andrew G. Britt (PhD, ’18) has published his first book, I’ll Samba Someplace Else: A Spatial History of Race, Ethnicity, and Displacement in São Paulo, with Duke University Press. Someplace Else charts the interwoven history of three of the city’s most iconic neighborhoods, popularly known as “African” Brasilândia, “Japanese” Liberdade, and “Italian” Bela Vista. Drawing on granular archival research, historical GIS, and sustained engagement with African-descendent cultural organizations in São Paulo, Britt demonstrates how the mid-twentieth-century construction of these neighborhoods served both to reproduce racial inequities and bolster discourses of multicultural harmony.

Mural by artist JOKS in São Paulo’s Brasilândia neighborhood.

Barbara Weinstein, Silver Professor of History at New York University, offered the following praise: “Andrew Britt has given us a remarkable book. By combining the latest digital tools with a trove of archival and oral sources, he enables us to see the city of São Paulo from entirely new angles.”

Britt is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his doctoral training in 2018 under the advisement of Drs. Jeffrey Lesser and Thomas D. Rogers.

by emoryhistorydept

Doctoral Candidate Emilie Cunning Publishes Article in ‘Modern American History’


Earlier this spring Doctoral candidate Emilie Cunning published an article titled “The Making of a Militarized War on Poverty: The Effort to Triangulate Military Service, Crime Prevention, and Social Citizenship through Project 100,000 and Project Transition” in the journal Modern American History. Cunning interprets these two programs, which focused on the military recruitment and rehabilitation of low-IQ men, as sitting at the nexus between the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam. Cunning’s graduate work is advised by Drs. Daniel LaChance and Mary L. Dudziak.

Separately, Cunning was recently accepted to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Summer Institute for ABD candidates. Held at the Ohio State University and hosted by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Summer 2026 Institute is co-directed by Christopher McKnight Nichols (Ohio State) and Andrew Preston (University of Virginia).

Read the abstract from Cunning’s Modern American History article below and find the full version here.

This article explores the programs known as Project 100,000 and Project Transition developed within the Johnson administration during the Vietnam War. Viewing them as the intersection between the War on Poverty and the War in Vietnam, this article contends with how these programs were designed to serve the goals both of social uplift and crime prevention through the rehabilitation of low-IQ men via military service. The article analyzes the racialized aspects of these programs, as they were disproportionately composed of Black men, and questions the motivations behind the construction of Project 100,000 and Project Transition as a means of “transporting” America’s racial unrest abroad. At its core, the article argues that these programs were inherently at odds with the intense manpower demands of the Vietnam War and the reluctancies of military officials to properly train Project 100,000 men. The program formed another tragedy of the Vietnam era.

by emoryhistorydept

Kreklau (PhD, ’18) Publishes Article in ‘German Studies Review’


Dr. Claudia Kreklau, a 2018 doctoral program alum and Honorary Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews, has published a new article in the journal German Studies Review. Titled “Masters of Food: Climate Crisis and Optimized Exploitation in an Atlantic Hinterland Before the Revolutions of 1848,” the work examines how dietary control and prescription served as a means for social control in a time of extreme climatic crisis.

Kreklau published her first book, The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910, with Berghahn Books earlier this year. The book as well as the new article originated in a research paper that Kreklau completed during coursework at Emory. Termed the “P-Paper” and produced by every graduate student before candidacy, this milestone helps students to develop their dissertation projects and lays the foundation for academic publication early in doctoral training.

Read the abstract of the German Studies Review article below along with the full piece here.

In 1818, the manorial lord Ludwig Ellrichshausen used his agricultural estate in Maisenhälden as a laboratory for optimized economic exploitation during a period of extreme climatic crisis. He designed a minimum-feed diet for his workers that was low in protein, devoid of fruits and vegetables, and insufficient in calories to support hard physical labor with the goal of engineering their bare subsistence to maximize outputs. The Speisemeister’s or master of food’s dietary prescription functioned as a means of social control in this Atlantic Hinterland, constructed to communicate social positioning via the symbolically charged means of food.

by emoryhistorydept

Byrnes (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘The United States and the Ends of Empire’


Dr. Sean T. Byrnes, a 2014 graduate of the doctoral program in U.S. history, recently published his second book, The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776, with Bloomsbury Press. The four-century history examines the relationship between the United States, empire, and decolonization from the revolutionary war through the present.

Fellow Emory History Department alum Dr. Elizabeth Stice (Palm Beach Atlantic University) recently interviewed Byrnes about his new monograph. Find their conversation here: “Interview with Sean Byrnes, author of ‘The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776.’”

Byrnes’s research centers on U.S. politics, international relations, and global economic inequality. His first book, Disunited Nations: U.S. Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, was published by LSU Press in 2021. His writings have also appeared in Time, The New Republic, Dissent, Jacobin, Diplomatic History, Diplomatica, International Journal, and for the History News Network. He hosts conversations with authors on the New Books Network, serves on the Board of Editors for Federal History, and is a Section Editor for the newly released Routledge Online Encyclopedia of the Cold War.

Byrnes completed his doctoral training under the advisement of Dr. Fraser Harbutt.

Read an abstract of the Byrnes’s new book below and learn more via Bloomsbury Press.

Few topics are more important to understanding the origins of the modern world than decolonization, and few countries have played a more important role in that history than the United States.In this book, Sean T. Byrnes provides a definitive, single-volume account of the relationship between the United States, decolonization, and world order.

Through a lively narrative history that ranges across four centuries, Byrnes reveals how the process of ending and replacing empires defined the American relationship to the world from the colonial era to the present. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution, hierarchies born of the imperial age—and defined by ideas about race, capitalism, and civilization—fundamentally shaped American views of who was entitled to sovereignty and when. Therefore, far from building a world of “Westphalian” sovereign equality, the United States instead manipulated, expanded, and then attempted to dominate globe spanning structures of wealth and power that served the few at the expense of the many.

From early interactions with Native Americans and a decolonizing Latin America, to efforts to bolster global hierarchies after the World Wars and influence the postcolonial “Third World”, The United States and the Ends of Empire, tells the story of a US that may not always have embraced formal empire but nevertheless still sought to organize the world in imperial ways. In the process, it reveals how Americans helped build today’s modern, globalized world—and the unequal hierarchies of wealth and power that define it.

by emoryhistorydept

Diego Javier Luis (C ’14) Wins AHA’s Bentley Prize in World History


Congratulations to History Department alum Dr. Diego Javier Luis on receiving the American Historical Association’s Jerry Bentley Prize in World History for his first book, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (Harvard University Press, 2024). This is the fourth prize for Luis’s work, following the 2024 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard UP, the 2025 Howard F. Cline Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association, and the 2025 Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions Book Prize.

Luis’s acclaimed work offers “The definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas.” In his review in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Rubén Carillo Martín describes the book as “a brilliant exercise of global microhistory and essential reading for anyone hoping to get a full picture of colonial Spanish America, Asian diaspora studies, or protoglobalization.”

Luis is Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor at The Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Emory in 2014 with a double major in History with highest honors and English and Creative Writing, before pursuing his PhD at Brown University.

by emoryhistorydept

Benjamin P. Hein (C, ’10) Publishes ‘The Migrant’s Spirit’ with Cambridge UP


Dr. Benjamin P. Hein, a 2010 Emory History alum and now Assistant Professor at Brown University, has published his first book: The Migrant’s Spirit: How Industrial Modernity Came to the German Lands (Oxford UP, 2025). Weaving economic history and the history of financial institutions with immigration and cultural history, The Migrant’s Spirit locates the impetus for Germany’s industrial modernization in transatlantic exchanges between German society and the expanding German diaspora in nineteenth-century North America.

Hein completed honors in history working with Professors Astrid M. Eckert and Brian Vick. He was awarded the 2010 Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award, given to a graduating student who displays high academic achievement and good works in the community. He received his PhD at Stanford University in 2018.

Read the full description of The Migrant’s Spirit:

When a process popularly known as the Industrial Revolution first took hold in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, many contemporaries were stunned by the scale and ferocity of the transformation. While Germany had long been considered a promising place to industrialize, given its historic ties to New World markets, skilled and educated workforce, and deep pockets of wealth, progress had been slow due to persistent indifference and skepticism across society. That people should have suddenly dropped their reservations and simply embraced the new industrial modernity defied all explanation. Grasping for answers, some concluded that the Germans must have fallen under the spell of the “capitalist spirit.”

Benjamin P. Hein locates the impetus for the abrupt transformation of German society after ca. 1850 in its cultural exchange with the country’s burgeoning diaspora in North America, one of the largest in this century. In correspondence and other “news from America,” the emigrants conveyed to their families, communities, and business associates in Europe a different set of norms and ethics regarding work, entrepreneurship, and commerce. By making it socially acceptable and politically meaningful to frequently change professions or to organize businesses as joint-stock corporations, they inadvertently mobilized an otherwise reluctant population for a more centralized regime of production that served global market forces instead of local needs and corporatist norms. They also helped popularize key institutional pillars of the new economy, like the universal bank, and inspired innovative commercial reforms, most notably the “limited liability partnership” (LLP), or “G.m.b.H.” in German, which became the legal foundation of Germany’s particularly robust small-business economy.

While addressing global trends, The Migrant’s Spirit makes these phenomena comprehensible through the lives of individuals who faced painful choices and moral quandaries as they attempted to navigate a new social and economic order and began to trust countrymen abroad over local sources of guidance. By reconstructing their struggles, Hein sheds new light on the transatlantic dimensions of Germany’s path to industrial modernity.

by emoryhistorydept

History Major Rafael Escoto Publishes Paper in ‘Central Europe Yearbook’


Junior history major Rafi Escoto recently published a paper in the Central Europe Yearbook, an open-access journal promoting the study of Central Europe among undergraduate students. Titled “Everything Old is New Again: Border Rituals and the Return of History in ‘Green Border,’” Escoto’s paper analyses Agnieszka Holland’s 2023 film about refugees from the Middle East and Africa who attempt to reach the European Union, only to become caught up in a geopolitical crisis triggered by the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.

Escoto initially wrote this paper in “HIST 145: The History of Now,” which is taught by Profs. Matthew Payne and Astrid M. Eckert. Find the abstract below, and read the complete work here: “Everything Old is New Again: Border Rituals and the Return of History in ‘Green Border.‘”

This paper argues that Green Border (2023), directed by Agnieszka Holland, transforms the Polish-Belarusian border into a site of moral ritual, where sacred violence replaces humanitarian law. Using Durkheim’s theories, Eastern European memory studies, and analyses of populism and asylum policy, the paper interprets the film as a historical recurrence rather than a modern crisis. Drawing on scholars like Törnquist-Plewa, Exeler, and Krastev, the analysis reveals how Europe’s border politics ritualize exclusion and revive authoritarian patterns under democratic guise. Methods include close film analysis and engagement with secondary literature on EU identity, populism, and the symbolic politics of migration.

by emoryhistorydept

Kreklau (PhD, ’18) Publishes Article in ‘German History’


Doctoral alum Claudia Kreklau, Honorary Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews, has published a new article in the journal German History. Titled “Vaterland, c.1780–1870,” the piece examines the multiple and shifting meanings of the German-language term meaning “fatherland.” The full abstract follows:

This article analyses the changing semiotics of the term Vaterland between 1780 and 1870 in a variety of German-language discussions by reconstructing specific instances of meaning. It finds that the term Vaterland held multiple meanings due to the range of religious, philosophic and political frameworks and historical frames of reference in which this term operated. A great variety of speakers produced and exercised meanings synchronically and modified them diachronically. Far from being synonymous with better-studied terms such as Germany or Volk, Vaterland meant something different in every instance of usage—and reflected contestations for the fatherland itself in the period examined here.

Kreklau recently published her first book, The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780-1910, with Berghahn Books. She completed her PhD in 2018 under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick.