Category / Publications

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!

by emoryhistorydept

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.  

by emoryhistorydept

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!

by emoryhistorydept

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.

by emoryhistorydept

Candido’s ‘Wealth, Property, and Land in Angola’ Wins ASA Book Prize

Congratulations to Dr. Mariana P. Candido, Winship Distinguished Professor of History, 2023-2026, and Professor of History, on receiving one of the most significant book prizes in African studies. The African Studies Association (ASA) awarded Candido’s most recent monograph, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality (Cambridge UP), with the ASA Best Book Prize for 2022. The prize is given “to the author of the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year.” Cátia Antunes (Leiden University) writes that “Candido’s approach, insights and poignant arguments will ignite profuse discussions and challenge common views regarding Africa and Africans. Candido is a unique historian and perhaps the most accomplished Africanist of the 21st century.” Earlier in 2023, Candido was one of 26 scholars based in the U.S. to receive the prestigious Berlin Prize, which supports a research fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. Read more about Wealth, Property, and Land in Angola below and browse past winners of the ASA Book Prize.

Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.

“Candido is a unique historian and perhaps the most accomplished Africanist of the 21st century.”

Cátia Antunes (Leiden University)

by abritt

‘Patchwork Freedoms’ Wins Book Prize From American Society for Legal History


The American Society for Legal History has awarded Adriana Chira’s Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022) with the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award, awarded annually for the best book in non-US legal history written in English. The prize committee praised how Chira “integrates legal and social history by seamlessly weaving together legal and nonlegal sources to tell a story that is complex, nuanced, and locally grounded.” Patchwork Freedoms was released as part of Cambridge’s Afro-Latin America series. Patchwork Freedoms has already won three other awards: Honorable Mention, Best Book, Nineteenth Century Section, from the Latin American Studies Association; the 2023 Elsa Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians; and the American Historical Association’s Rawley Prize. Read the full prize citation from the ASLH below.

Adriana Chira’s Patchwork Freedoms is a compelling account of the ways in which the free and semi-free black residents of eastern Cuba used law and custom to eke out their freedom over the course of the nineteenth century. Chira demonstrates how “day in and day out, enslaved people chipped away at enslavers’ authority locally, by negotiating the terms of their manumission and land access. They pulled one another out of plantation slavery gradually, yet consistently.” The committee was especially impressed by how Patchwork Freedoms integrates legal and social history by seamlessly weaving together legal and nonlegal sources to tell a story that is complex, nuanced, and locally grounded.

by emoryhistorydept

Yannakakis Interview, Making and Remaking History in Colonial Oaxaca, Airs on University and Community Radio

Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Professor of History and Associate Department Chair, was recently interviewed by the Oaxaca-based university radio station Radio Pez en el SURCO (“Servicios Universitarios y Redes de Conocimientos en Oaxaca” [“University Services and Networks of Knowledge in Oaxaca”]). Titled “Oaxaca colonial, haciendo e rehaciendo historia colonial” (“Colonial Oaxaca, making and remaking history”), the interview draws on Yannakakis’ newest monograph, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke UP, 2023). The interview was and will continue to be aired on the following Oaxaca university and community radio stations: Radio Universidad de Oaxaca (Sept 19, 2023); Radio Nanhdiá, Movimiento Radio, Estéreo Lluvia y Radio Aire Zapoteco Bëë Xhidza (September 23, 2023); Radio Nandiá (September 24, 2023); and Estéreo Dinastía Xhdca (September 25, 2023). You can also catch a recorded version on Spotify.