The article was produced as part of the Senegal Liberations Project (of which Aponte is a team member), a digital humanities collaborative formerly funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This project analyzes the liberation records of 28,930 enslaved Africans who sought freedom between 1857 and 1903.
Aponte’s research interests center on emancipation, labor, and law in the French empire. Her work investigates how women wove, and were woven into, the financial and familial networks of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Senegal. Drs. Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais serve as her advisers.
Dr. Danielle Wiggins, a 2018 graduate of the U.S. History doctoral program, has published her first monograph: Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Framed by Atlanta in the 1970s and ’80s, Black Excellence “offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.” Marcia Chatelain, author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, describes Wiggins’ work as a “richly researched and beautifully written analysis of the role of Black liberals, a complicated group of scholars, activists, and leaders, who sought racial justice while holding onto antiquated, moralistic, and harmful views of the Black communities that needed justice the most.” Wiggins recently joined the history department at Georgetown University as an assistant professor. She completed her dissertation under the advisement of Dr. Joseph Crespino, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Jimmy Carter Professor of History. Read more about Black Excellence via University of Pennsylvania Press.
Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, published Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil with Duke University Press in the spring of 2025. Editora UNESP recently released the Portuguese-language version, Viver e morrer em São Paulo: Imigração, saúde e infraestrutura urbana (século XIX até o presente). Focused on São Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood, Living and Dying examines competing visions of well-being in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials. Jerry Dávila, who holds the Jorge Paulo Lemann Chair in Brazilian History at the University of Illinois, describes Lesser’s book as “methodologically innovative, conceptually powerful, and engagingly written.” Both the English-language and Portuguese-language versions will have open access editions thanks to a tome (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Emory University.
In the Q&A below, Dr. Lesser gives us a glimpse into the making of the monograph as part of the History Department’s New Books 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.
Living and Dying was conceived about a decade ago during a very boring meeting of department chairs and administrators. Fortunately, I was sitting in the back of the room with the bad kids, including Uriel Kitron, at the time chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences. As we discussed our mutual research interests in Brazil, we began to think of a project on the relation between immigration and health. It did not take long for us to jointly teach an interdisciplinary seminar on the topic and arrange a grant to bring some students in that class to Brazil. Starting about 5 years ago, I was able to arrange regular funding for what became the Lesser Research Collective, an interdisciplinary group of students from Emory and UNIFESP in São Paulo. While we all work in the São Paulo neighborhood of Bom Retiro, on questions related broadly to health, we do so via individual projects and then we meet weekly to share our research.
What was the research process like?
Living and Dying reflects the many approaches that I use to generate and analyze data. Like many in the humanities, I spent most of my career thinking of myself as a solitary researcher even while acknowledging the help of archivists, librarians, and students. For this project, however, I worked with three interconnected teams whose data, ideas, and conclusions influence every sentence of this book. The research is informed by disciplines including history, cultural studies, public health, anthropology, geography, and sociology.
I used a variety of historical and contemporary sources, including archives, observation, oral histories, cartography, digital map creation, photographic exhibits, and participation in city-sponsored health programs. Much of the material was found in the archives of the Emílio Ribas Public Health Museum, situated in the building that had been São Paulo’s Central Disinfectory, and the archival and historical space became an actor in the interpretation of some of the documents.
I used the Pauliceia 2.0 Historical Geographic Information Systems Platform to link quantitative data (e.g., demography, infrastructure planning, health outcomes, and socioenvironmental challenges) to the built environment, especially in order to see continuities in spatial patterns over time. I often matched the quantitative data with blueprints, architects’ notes, street notes, and press reports to map contemporary human flows through and around the buildings, which I then compared with photographs and etchings from earlier periods. My own observations and oral histories emerged from multiple years embedded in a primary care team at the Bom Retiro Public Health Clinic.
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
I loved writing “Unliving Rats and Undead Immigrants” because it gave me a chance to treat zombies and ghosts as serious historical actors. The chapter analyzes why public health officials targeted Bom Retiro and its residents during the turn-of-the-century bubonic plague and 1918 influenza outbreaks. I show how the two epidemics led to similar discourses from health officials, often targeting immigrants. The immigrant working classes responded to the two events in similar ways as well, ranging from using popular medicinal practices for care and cure, to rising from the dead to wander to and from Bom Retiro. The chapter also analyzes how a public health campaign to buy rats during the late 19th century Bubonic Flu outbreak led to surprising (from the perspective of officials) responses from the public, like breeding rats or collecting them outside of the city and then bringing them to the Ministry of Health for sale.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda at this point in time?
My beloved advisor and mentor, the later Warren Dean, always argued that we should try to change our research agenda after each book. While in some ways I have rejected his advice (I am broadly interested in Brazil, ethnicity, and national identity) I have taken to heart his broad position, writing about topics as different as armed guerilla organizations, ethnic militancy, and public health. One idea I have for next book is to write the history of modern Brazil via the story of the Corinthians football team (the greatest in the universe!), which was founded in Bom Retiro by English railroad workers in the early twentieth century and whose captain, Socrates, would lead a movement called Corinthian democracy, against the dictatorship in the 1970s.
“During the age of Jim Crow, especially, many white people saw educated African Americans as a threat to the racial status quo so there was no enthusiasm or adequate financial appropriation to assist African Americans in pursuing postbaccalaureate degrees. That is why segregation scholarship programs were never funded sufficiently and demand always exceeded supply.“
Recent doctoral program graduate Kyungtaek Kwon has published an article in the journal Russian History. Titled “Inspection journey of K.E. Voroshilov to the Far East (1931),” the article follows the travels of prominent Soviet official K.E. Voroshilov to military and industrial facilities in the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East. Kwon shows that Voroshilov sought to evaluate the process and results of the industrialization and militarization of the USSR in defense preparations.
Kwon completed his graduate work under the advisement of Dr. Matthew J. Payne in 2023. His dissertation was titled, “Identifying the City: Komsomol’sk-na-Amure Transformation from Military Outpost to the City of Youth in the Soviet Far East, 1932-1982.” He has recently been appointed assistant professor in the History Department of Pusan National University.
Doctoral program alum Navyug Gill (’14) has received the Henry A. Wallace Award from the Agricultural History Society for his 2024 work, Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab (Stanford UP). The Wallace prize recognizes the best book on agricultural history outside of the United States. The prize committee offered the following appraisal of Labors of Division:
“Navyug Gill’s Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab traces the invention of a peasantry in the context of colonialism and demonstrates how ‘landless laborer’ and ‘landowning peasant’ emerged as vital political, cultural, and economic categories in the making of global capitalism under colonialism. The ambitious book weaves together a wide variety of sources to generate a history that deeply troubles our received understanding of the role of ‘peasants’ and ‘the peasantry’ and the position of agriculture within the history of political economy. In Gill’s capable hands, we must reckon with the surprising idea that modernity was not the death of the peasant, but its site of origin. This book challenges a range of fields in the social sciences and humanities by questioning one of the fundamental categories—the peasant—mobilized at the birth of foundational political and economic theories across the disciplines.”
Gill completed his doctoral work under the advisement of Dr. Gyanendra Pandey, and he is currently Associate Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His scholarly and public writings have appeared in venues such as Past and Present, the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Outlook, Al Jazeera, Scroll, the Law and Political Economy Project, Borderlines and Trolley Times.
Dr. Yanna Yannakakis has been named Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History in recognition of her excellent scholarship, outstanding teaching, and deep service to Emory. Yannakakis is a social and cultural historian of colonial Latin America with specializations in the history of Mexico, ethnohistory, the history of legal systems, and the interaction of indigenous peoples and institutions in Mexico. The new position is effective September 1, 2025.
Her most recent book, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom & Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press, 2023) was awarded the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History and the Friedrich Katz Prize in Latin American and Caribbean History, one of the top awards from the American Historical Association. Since Time Immemorial 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 monograph was published open access with support from Emory’s TOME initiative.
Yannakakis’ first book, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2008), examined how native cultural brokers negotiated with Spanish courts and the Catholic Church to open and maintain a space for the political and cultural autonomy of indigenous elites and their communities during Mexico’s colonial period. The book won the 2009 Howard Francis Cline Memorial Award from the Conference on Latin American History for the best book on the history of Latin America’s Indigenous peoples.
Yannakakis has co-edited or co-authored multiple other books and articles, including Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Colonial Mexico and the Andes (Duke University Press, 2014) (with Gabriela Ramos), Los indios ante la justicia local: intérpretes, oficiales, y litigantes en Nueva España y Guatemala siglos XVI-XVIII (Colegio de Michoacán, 2019) (with Luis Alberto Arrioja Díaz Viruell and Martina Schrader-Kniffki), “A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” American Historical Review (February 2019) (with Bianca Premo), and the special issue “Law, Politics, and Indigeneity in the Making of Ethnohistory: Perspectives from Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific,” Ethnohistory (70:2, 2023) (with Miranda Johnson).
Do’s grandfather, Đỗ Phương Anh, in front of Bách Thảo Market in Nashville, after passing his citizenship test in 2000. Photo courtesy of the Anhhuy Do.
Alumnus Anhhuy Do, a 2024 graduate who completed majors in History and Political Science, has published a powerful article in Southern Spaces. The piece, “Sài Gòn to Nashville: A Refugee Journey,” traces the remarkable and harrowing migration of his family from Vietnam to Nashville, Tennessee, where they resettled in the 1990s as part of the U.S. government’s Humanitarian Operation. Published fifty years after the fall of Sài Gòn and the communist takeover of Laos, Cambodia, and Việt Nam, Do’s piece illuminates the legacies of the post-Việt Nam War era in Southeast Asia and among Vietnamese American communities throughout the U.S.
While at Emory, Do was active in many groups, including Asian Pacific-Islander Desi American Activists, Pi Sigma Alpha, the Vietnamese Student Association, he Atlanta Urban Debate League, Center for Civic and Community Engagement (CCE) Society, and Imagining Democracy Lab. In his senior year, he won the History Department’s Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award and the Jane Yang Award for Community Advocacy from the Office of Campus Life.
Do is pursuing his PhD in Vietnamese History from Princeton University, supported by a Presidential Fellowship. He extends a special thank you to Dr. Allen Tullos, Professor and Co-Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, “for making this publication possible and remaining steadfast in amplifying unheard voices across Southern US history.” Read Do’s piece here: “Sài Gòn to Nashville: A Refugee Journey.”
“Many South Vietnamese sought new identities as they resettled in locations such as California, Texas, Washington State, Louisiana, and the DC metro area including Maryland and northern Virginia. Perhaps surprisingly, Tennessee also became home to generations of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants with intense transnational migration histories. One family’s story is that of my own, whose refugee experience does not follow the typical timeline of helicopter escapees and boat people. Rather, as Humanitarian Operation arrivals, my family’s history offers an illuminating narrative.“
Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, has published a new monograph, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil, with Duke University Press. The work examines competing visions of wellbeing in Brazil among racialized immigrants, policymakers, and health officials over 150 years and primarily in São Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood, drawing out the connected systems of the built environment, public health laws and practices, and citizenship. In addition to historical and literary documentation, Lesser’s book was informed by a multi-year observation of a basic health team at the Octávio Augusto Rodovalho Public Health Clinic of the Brazilian National Health Service. Read praise for Living and Dying below and find the full open access book from Duke UP.
“Living and Dying in São Paulo is methodologically innovative, conceptually powerful, and engagingly written. Jeffrey Lesser’s book has rare precision and creativity. Not only does he give an insightful reading of place and people, he also makes a bold case for historians to adopt new approaches and for those in the social and biomedical sciences to pose questions historically. This is the kind of writing I am sure most historians—myself included—wish they could do.” – Jerry Dávila, Jorge Paulo Lemann Chair in Brazilian History, the University of Illinois.
Dr. Jessica Catherine Reuther, a 2016 graduate of the doctoral program and Associate Professor of History at Ball State University, has published her first book, The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey: Portraits of West African Girlhood, 1720–1940 (Indiana University Press, 2025). Relying on research throughout the world – from Benin, Senegal, France, and Switzerland to the United States – The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey examines the common practice of girl fostering, or “entrusting,” in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) from 1720 to 1940. Reuther’s book draws from her dissertation, “Borrowed Children, Entrusted Girls: Legal Encounters with Girlhood in French West Africa, c. 1900-1941,” which was advised by Dr. Kristin Mann, Professor Emerita.
Read the abstract of The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey below and consider purchasing a discounted copy during Women’s History Month from IU Press with code U25WHM (discount is 40%).
From the 1720s to the 1940s, parents in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) developed and sustained the common practice of girl fostering, or “entrusting.” Transferring their daughters at a young age into foster homes, Dahomeans created complex relationships of mutual obligation, kinship, and caregiving that also exploited girls’ labor for the economic benefit of the women who acted as their social mothers.
Drawing upon oral tradition, historic images, and collective memories, Jessica Reuther pieces together the fragmentary glimpses of girls’ lives contained in colonial archives within the framework of traditional understandings about entrustment. Placing these girls and their social mothers at the center of history brings to light their core contributions to local and global political economies, even as the Dahomean monarchy, global trade, and colonial courts reshaped girlhood norms and fostering practices.
Reuther reveals that the social, economic, and political changes wrought by the expansion of Dahomey in the eighteenth century; the shift to “legitimate” trade in agricultural products in the nineteenth century; and the imposition of French colonialism in the twentieth all fundamentally altered—and were altered by—the intimate practice of entrusting female children between households. Dahomeans also valorized this process as a crucial component of being “well-raised”—a sentiment that continues into the present, despite widespread Beninese opposition to modern-day forms of child labor.
