Category / Publications

by emoryhistorydept

Picone (Ph.D. ’19) Publishes ‘Landscaping Patagonia’ with UNC Press


Dr. María de los Ángeles Picone (PhD, 2019) has published her first book, Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina, with UNC Press. Focused on northern Patagonia in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the inventive monograph charts how an array of people who lived in, governed, and traveled through this region “sought to construct versions of Chile and Argentina based on their ideas about and experiences in geographical space.” Dr. Emily Wakild, a leading environmental historian of Latin America, describes Landscaping Patagonia as a “masterful, field-changing work.” She continues: “The Patagonian landscape takes center stage as Picone brings to life the people who inhabited this ecologically and culturally expansive region.” Picone, currently an Assistant Professor of History at Boston College, completed her dissertation under the advisement of Drs. Jeffrey Lesser, Thomas D. Rogers, and Yanna Yannakakis in 2019. Read the full abstract of Landscaping Patagonia below.

In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as “desert,” through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argentina, explorers, migrants, local authorities, bandits, and visitors also made sense of the nation by inhabiting the physical space of the northern Patagonian Andes. They surveyed passes, opened roads, claimed land titles or leases, traveled miles to the nearest police station, rode miles on horseback to escape the police, and hiked the landscape.

María de los Ángeles Picone tells the story of how people living, governing, and traveling through northern Patagonia sought to construct versions of Chile and Argentina based on their ideas about and experiences in geographical space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By repositioning the analytical focus from Santiago and Buenos Aires to northern Patagonia, Picone reveals how a wide array of actors, with varying degrees of political, economic, and social power, assigned distinctive—and sometimes conflicting—meanings to space and national identity.

by emoryhistorydept

Alumni Update: Nick Sessums (’24) Publishes Essay in ‘Central Europe Yearbook’

The History Department was pleased to receive an update from Nick Sessums, a 2024 alumnus who graduated with honors. After nine months of drafts, revisions, edits, and reviews, Sessums has just published an essay, titled “Russification and Russianization in Modern Historiography,” in the Central Europe Yearbook.

The essay project began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As a student of history, politics, culture, and international relations, Sessums was captivated both by the historical moment itself and what it said about the world that we live in. Russia’s invasion went against everything that he had been taught about how people and governments were supposed to operate. He had to know why reality did not match his perception of the world.

In the Spring of 2023, he began researching and writing his undergraduate thesis, “Parallel Nations: Ukrainian, Russian, and Imperial Identity in Right-Bank Little Russia” (submitted in April 2024). While he answered many of his original questions in this process, he also began to ask new ones. He started to explore not just the current and historical events themselves, but how the people researching them talk about and interact with them.

Those questions led him to write the essay on Russification and Russianization. He addressed the current moment for Russian and Ukrainian Studies scholarship, particularly for the study of the Ukrainian-Russian borderlands that have faced the brunt of the Russian invasion. His article is also shaped by larger, structural questions regarding disciplinarity, as Slavic Studies in general faces both external and internal challenges in today’s academy. Finally, he highlights the continued role of memory in the field, as the way that we remember historical events often shapes how we study them going forward.

Sessums is especially grateful to his former professors, Dr. Astrid M. Eckert and Dr. Matthew Payne, who told him that his work was good enough for publication and helped him push it to the finish line.

by emoryhistorydept

Brunner (PhD, ’24) Publishes Article in ‘African Economic History’

Dr. Georgia Brunner, a 2024 graduate of the History doctoral program, has published a new article in the journal African Economic History. Titled “Famine, Labor, and Power in Colonial Rwanda, 1916–1944,” the piece explores how colonial administrators used famine to extract labor from Africans in Rwanda. Brunner completed their dissertation, “Building a Nation: Gender, Labor, and the Politics of Nationalism in Colonial Rwanda,” under the advisement of Clifton Crais, Professor of History. They are currently Prestigious Fellowships Advisor in the Office of Undergraduate Education at Georgia Tech. Read the abstract of Brunner’s piece below and find the full article here.

In the early twentieth century, Rwandans faced a number of colonial pressures, first from Germans interested in solidifying their vast East African empire, and then by Belgian troops fighting in the First World War. This article argues that Europeans exploited Rwandans in times of crisis, particularly during war and famine, to cement their control over Rwanda. Both Germans and Belgians fought over porters and land, causing significant famine throughout the war-torn territory. Later, Belgians capitalized on two subsequent famines to increase compulsory labor under the guise that such labor was needed to end famine. This article uses Anglican, newly available Catholic missionary documents, and Belgian colonial records to discuss (a) the cause of famines in colonial Rwanda, (b) the ways that colonial administrators used famines to extract unfree labor, and (c) how those systems of labor extraction continued in times of plenty and cemented colonial presence in the territory.

by emoryhistorydept

Sanders Chronicles the Impacts of “Segregation Scholarships”

Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs with UNC Press. The book chronicles the little-known history of “segregation scholarships,” a pre–Brown v. Board of Education practice wherein southern states paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education instead of creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. A finalist for the 2025 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize, A Forgotten Migration was also the focus of a recent piece in Forbes. Read an excerpt from that piece, in which Sanders explains the genesis of the project, along with the full article: “A History Of ‘Segregation Scholarships’ And The Impact On HBCUs.”

“Growing up in rural North Carolina, I noticed that many of the retired Black public school teachers in my church had master’s degrees from NYU and Columbia University’s Teachers College. Quick math let me know that they had earned these degrees in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I asked my father why these women had chosen to go so far away for graduate school and he answered my question with a question: ‘Did they really have a choice?’” Sanders elaborated, “My dad’s comments stayed with me and I began exploring the credentials of Black public school teachers in the decades before desegregation and realized that Black teachers all over the South seemed to have these degrees from northeastern and midwest institutions.”

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!

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.