Category / Publications

by abritt

Emory Historians Celebrated in ‘Feast of Words’

Each year the Emory Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, Emory Libraries, and the Emory Barnes and Noble Bookstore host the “Feast of Words,” an event celebrating Emory faculty who have written or edited books in the prior year. This year’s edition, which took place via Zoom, featured multiple works published by History Department faculty, associated faculty, and an alumnus between September 2020 and August 2021. Find a list of those faculty below, along with their publications, and watch the full virtual celebration here.

Anderson, Carol (African American Studies). The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Bloomsbury.

Andrade, Antonio (History). The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China. Princeton UP.

Dudziak, Mary (Law) and Mark Philip Bradley, eds. Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism. U of Massachusetts P.

Guidotti-Hernandez, Nicole (English). Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora. Duke UP.

Lal, Ruby (Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies). Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan. Penguin Random House, India.

Pardo, Rafael (Law), Paul Barron, and Mark Wessman. Secured Transactions: Problems and Materials. West Academic.

Perry, Craig (Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Jewish Studies), David Eltis (History, emeritus), Stanley Engerman, and David Richardson, eds. The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420. Cambridge UP.

by abritt

Drs. Chira and Armstrong-Partida Publish Articles in September Issue of ‘AHR’

Two faculty members in the Emory Department of History have published articles in the September issue of the American Historical Review. Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor, published “Freedom with Local Bonds: Custom and Manumission in the Age of Emancipation.” Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Associate Professor, reflects on collaborative research with her co-author Dr. Susan McDonough in a piece titled, “Finding Amica in the Archives: Navigating a Path between Strategic Collaboration and Independent Research.”

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Dr. Navyug Gill (PhD, ’14) Publishes Article in ‘Past & Present’

PhD alum Dr. Navyug Gill has published an article in the journal Past & Present. Gill completed his dissertation, “Labours of Division: Peasant Castes and the Politics of Agrarian Hierarchy in Colonial Panjab,” in 2014 under the advisement of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Gyanendra Pandey. Gill is now Assistant Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University. Read the abstract of the Past & Present article below along with the full piece here: “Accumulation by Attachment: Colonial Benevolence and the Rule of Capital in Nineteenth-Century Panjab.”

A persistent theme in the emergence of capitalism is the displacement of peasants from the countryside into industrializing cities, with regions not undergoing such a transition usually deemed semi-feudal, proto-capitalist or pre-modern. Instead of separations, however, Panjab was the site of an altogether different dynamic of accumulation based on forging a series of novel attachments. This article begins by tracing the East India Company’s conquest in 1849, and the development of an ostensibly benevolent land revenue settlement based on surveying, measuring and calculating agrarian potential. Next, it examines how this process generated a set of natural and human contingencies so that certain castes were fixed to parcels of land, and expected to pay increasing rates while cultivating global commodities and conducting exchanges in cash. To make sense of this difference, it then contrasts the archive of settlement work with Karl Marx’s narrative of primitive accumulation, to explicate the conditions and limitations of its universality. Together this demonstrates how caste-based peasant agriculture in Panjab was a new phenomenon implicated in a modern yet distinctive rule of capital. In a broader sense, this offers possibilities to rethink the politics of comparative analysis as well as the alterity of capitalist transitions across the colonial world.

by abritt

Dr. Aditya Pratap Deo (PhD, ’13) Publishes ‘Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India’

Congratulations to Dr. Aditya Pratap Deo on the publication of his book Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India: Enchanting the State (Routledge, 2022). Deo, who teaches History at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, completed his dissertation in 2013 under the advisement of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Gyanendra Pandey. Read Routledge’s summary of Kings, Spirits and Memory below.

“Part anthropological history and part memoir, this book is a unique study of the polity of the colonial-princely state of Kanker in central India. The author, a scion of the erstwhile ruling family of Kanker, delves into the oral accounts given in the ancestral deity practices of the mixed tribe-caste communities of the region to highlight popular narratives of its historical polity. As he struggles with his own dilemmas as ethnographer-king, what comes into view is a polity where the princely state is drawn out amidst a terrain of gods and spirits as much as that of law courts and magistrates, and political power is divided, contested and shared between the raja/state and the people. This study constitutes not only an intervention in the larger debate on the relationship between state formations and tribal peoples, but also on the very nature of history as a knowledge practice, especially the understandings of power, authority and sovereignty in it.

“Combining intensive ethnography, complementary archival work and crucial theoretical questions engaging social scientists worldwide, the author charts an unusual explanatory path that can allow us to obtain a meaningful understanding of societies/peoples that have historically been marginalized and seen as different. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of history, anthropology, politics, religion, tribal society and Modern South Asia.“

by abritt

Sean Andrew Wempe (PhD, 2015) Discusses ‘Revenants of the German Empire’ on New Books Network

Dr. Sean Andrew Wempe, A 2015 PhD alumnus and Assistant Professor of Modern European History at California State University–Bakersfield, was recently interviewed for New Books Network. Wempe discusses his 2019 book Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford UP) with Jack Guenther, a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University. Find the link to the interview here.

by abritt

Scott Benigno (C22) Publishes Article on British Railway Investments in Brazil

History major Scott Benigno (C22) recently published an article in the Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History titled, “The Economics of Empires: An Analysis of British Railway Investments in 1850s Imperial Brazil.” The article investigates Britain’s interests in developing railways in Brazil before the country’s industrialization. The paper was mentored by Dr. Thomas D. Rogers, Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History and Arthur Blank/NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences (2018-2021). Read the article abstract below and find the full piece here.

“While Brazil is not often thought to be connected to Britain in our present day, Brazil’s early independent history was inextricably linked with the European imperial power. Using A Report on the Proposed Railway in the Province of Pernambuco, Brazil written by British civil engineer Edward De Mornay in 1855 as an example, this paper looks specifically at Britain’s interests in developing railways in the mostly non-industrialized Brazil and the reasons behind.”


by abritt

Alumni Update: Jeffrey S. Reznick (PhD, 1999)

Jeffrey S. Reznick (PhD 1999), chief of the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), has written the first study of Rudolf H. Sauter (1895–1977), the German-born artist, poet, cultural observer and nephew of the famed novelist John Galsworthy. To be published by Anthem Press in January 2022, War and Peace in the Worlds of Rudolf H. Sauter: A Cultural History of a Creative Life reveals its subject as a creative figure in his own right who produced an intriguing body of artistic and literary work spanning from World War I through the Cold War. Additionally, connected to his leadership of the NLM History of Medicine Division, Reznick recently co-authored “History matters: in the past, present & future of the NLM” in the Journal of the Medical Library Association. The article explains how—since the release of the 2015 report of the NIH’s Director’s advisory committee on the future of the National Library of Medicine—history continues to matter at NLM with its History of Medicine Division achieving many collaborative contributions toward the advancement of the library in the 21st century and for the benefit of historical research today and tomorrow.

by abritt

Dr. Sean T. Byrnes (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘Disunited Nations’ with LSU Press

Congratulations to Dr. Sean T. Byrnes, a 2014 graduate of the PhD program in history, on the publication of his first book, Disunited Nations: US Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right. Louisiana State University published the monograph. Byrnes is an instructor of history at Western Governor’s University. Read the description of the book below and find out more here.

Disunited Nations explores American reactions to hostile world opinion, as voiced in the United Nations by representatives of the Global South from 1970 to 1984. Sean T. Byrnes suggests this challenge had a significant impact on US policy and politics, shaping the rise of the New Right and neoliberal visions of the world economy. Integrating developments in American political and diplomatic history with the international history of decolonization and the “Third World,” Disunited Nations adds to our understanding of major transitions in foreign policy as the US moved away from the expansive internationalist global commitments of the immediate postwar era toward a more nationalist and neoliberal understanding of international affairs.

by abritt

Anjuli Webster Publishes Article in ‘Theoria’

History graduate student Anjuli Webster recently published an article titled ‘South African Social Science and the Azanian Philosophical Tradition‘ in the journal Theoria. Webster is a student in African history with research interests in legal history, empire, sovereignty, and borderlands in Southern Africa, especially. Read the abstract from Webster’s piece below, along with the full article: “South African Social Science and the Azanian Philosophical Tradition.”

This article discusses the contemporary history of South Afri-can social science in relation to the Azanian Philosophical Tradition. It is addressed directly to white scholars, urging introspection with regard to the ethical question of epistemic justice in relation to the evolution of the social sciences in conqueror South Africa. I consider the establishment of the professional social sciences at South African universities in the early twentieth century as a central part of the epistemic project of conqueror South Africa. In contrast, the Azanian Philosophical Tradition is rooted in African philosophy and articulated in resistance against the injustice of conquest and colonialism in southern Africa since the seventeenth century. It understands conquest as the fundamental historical antagonism shaping the philosophical, political, and material problem of ‘South Africa’. The tradition is silenced by and exceeds the political and epistemic strictures of the settler colonial nation state and social science.

by abritt

Andrade Publishes ‘The Last Embassy’ with Princeton UP

Dr. Tonio Andrade, Professor of History, has published a new book with Princeton University Press titled The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (2021). Through an immersive narrative that draws on sources in Qing, Korean, Dutch, French, and Spanish, Andrade revises prevailing narratives about diplomatic and cultural relations between the West and China in the pre-modern period. One reviewer described The Last Embassy as “a superbly written, illuminating, and thought-provoking book on an important topic long overlooked by historians.” Read the full book summary below, along with an interview Andrade gave to Princeton UP in July 2021.

George Macartney’s disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role in the prevailing narrative of modern Sino-European relations. Summarily dismissed by the Qing court, Macartney failed in nearly all of his objectives, perhaps setting the stage for the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century and the mistrust that still marks the relationship today. But not all European encounters with China were disastrous. The Last Embassy tells the story of the Dutch mission of 1795, bringing to light a dramatic but little-known episode that transforms our understanding of the history of China and the West.

Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Tonio Andrade paints a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of an age marked by intrigues and war. China was on the brink of rebellion. In Europe, French armies were invading Holland. Enduring a harrowing voyage, the Dutch mission was to be the last European diplomatic delegation ever received in the traditional Chinese court. Andrade shows how, in contrast to the British emissaries, the Dutch were men with deep knowledge of Asia who respected regional diplomatic norms and were committed to understanding China on its own terms.

Beautifully illustrated with sketches and paintings by Chinese and European artists, The Last Embassy suggests that the Qing court, often mischaracterized as arrogant and narrow-minded, was in fact open, flexible, curious, and cosmopolitan.