The Emory News Center recently featured honors won by two History Department faculty members. The article highlights Associate Professor Astrid M. Eckert‘s West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Economy, Culture & Environment in the Borderlands (Oxford UP, 2019), which has won awards from the Central European History Society, the German Studies Association, and the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. In addition, the Emory Report highlights Professor Sharon Strocchia‘s Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, which was awarded the Marraro Prize by the Society for Italian Historical Studies. Read about other faculty and staff awards from across the Emory campus: “Acclaim: Recent honors for Emory faculty and staff.”
Category / Publications
Lesser Research Collective Publishes Article in ‘Health Education & Behavior’
Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Learning, has published an article in the journal Health Education & Behavior with other members of the Lesser Research Collective, including Emory’s Emily S. Pingel, MPH (Sociology) and Alexandra Llovet. Read the abstract below along with the full article: “Committing to Continuity: Primary Care Practices During COVID-19 in an Urban Brazilian Neighborhood.”
“Decreased engagement in preventive services, including vaccination, during the COVID-19 pandemic represents a grave threat to global health. We use the case of the Bom Retiro Public Health Clinic in São Paulo, Brazil, to underscore how continuity of care is not only feasible, but a crucial part of health as a human right. The long-standing relationship between the clinic and neighborhood residents has facilitated ongoing management of physical and mental health conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the clinic’s history of confronting infectious diseases has equipped it to adapt preventive services to meet patients’ needs during the pandemic. Our academic–community partnership used a multidisciplinary approach, relying on analysis of historical data, ethnographic data, and direct clinical experience. We identify specific prevention strategies alongside areas for improvement. We conclude that the clinic serves as a model for continuity of care in urban settings during a pandemic.“
Debjani Bhattacharyya (PhD, ’14) Publishes “Almanac of A Tide Country” for SSRC’s ‘Items’
Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya, Associate Professor of History at Drexel University and a 2014 graduate of the PhD program, recently published an article in the Social Science Research Council’s digital publication Items. Published as a part of Items‘s “Ways of Water” series, the piece analyzes visual and historical representations of the tides of the Hooghly River in Kolkata. Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the 2019 honorable mention award for the best book in urban history from the Urban History Association. Read the Items piece here: “Almanac of A Tide Country.”
Strocchia’s ‘Forgotten Healers’ Awarded 2020 Marraro Prize
The Society for Italian Historical Studies (SIHS) has awarded the 2020 Marraro Prize for the best book in Italian history to Prof. Sharon Strocchia’s Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). The prize committee offered the following appreciation of Prof. Strocchia’s work:
“Drawing on extensive work in Florentine archives, Strocchia develops a sophisticated and incisive investigation of the manifold roles women played as protagonists in Renaissance health practices. Her case studies illuminate the contributions of convent pharmacies and pharmacists, of aristocratic women who prepared and employed household remedies, and of the poor young women who worked as nurses in the pox hospital. More suggestive than conclusive, this pioneering work opens up inviting pathways for further investigation.”
Read our Q&A with Dr. Strocchia about Forgotten Healers from earlier this year: “New Books Series: Q & A with Sharon T. Strocchia about ‘Forgotten Healers.’”
PhD Student Anjuli Webster Publishes Article in the ‘South African Historical Journal’
Second-year PhD student Anjuli Webster recently published an article in the South African Historical Journal. The article is titled “Transatlantic Knowledge: Race Relations, Social Science and Native Education in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa.” Webster’s faculty advisers are Dr. Clifton Crais and Dr. Yanna Yannakakis. Read the abstract of “Transatlantic Knowledge” below along with the full article.
In this paper I trace knowledge flows between South Africa and the United States in the early twentieth century. I analyse these flows as parts within a broader white supremacist political project and technology of power. Focusing on the early Union period from the 1910s to the 1930s, I explore links, networks and exchanges within and across imperial and colonial spaces that spanned the Atlantic. These include institutional, financial, intellectual and personal relationships and networks between philanthropic institutions, race relations ‘experts’ and social scientists. In particular, I focus on the South African Institute of Race Relations’ role in importing education models from the American South and shaping narratives around ‘native education’ in South Africa. In this case, positivist science functioned to instil and root a racial order. I argue that attending to the circulation and entanglement of ideas between these global spheres offers new insight into the genealogy of anthropological and social scientific knowledge during the historical conjuncture of the Union period.
Goldstein’s 2006 ‘The Price of Whiteness’ Attains New Relevance in 2020
Dr. Eric Goldstein, Associate Professor of History, published The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity with Princeton UP in 2006. Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies recently published a story outlining the special relevance Goldstein’s work has gained in the midst of current, widespread protests for racial justice. Read an excerpt from their feature below along with the full article, “Goldstein’s book takes on new relevance in 2020.”
“In the last few months, Goldstein has been contacted by a host of groups and organizations from across the country—both from inside and outside the Jewish community— to help them sort through the complicated set of issues around American Jews and their place in current discussions about race and privilege. In a recent webinar with the Jewish Federations of North America, Goldstein explained that he first became interested in these issues during his graduate training at the University of Michigan, where he was the only student in his cohort studying U.S. history in combination with modern Jewish history. As it became clear to him how central issues of race and racial discrimination were to the shaping of American history, he was pushed to think about how the American Jewish experience was also decisively shaped by a national culture in which “black” and “white” were the most important categories of difference. He explored these questions in a doctoral thesis that would eventually become The Price of Whiteness.”
Eckert’s ‘West Germany and the Iron Curtain’ Wins 2020 GSA/DAAD Book Prize
Congratulations to Dr. Astrid M. Eckert, Associate Professor, who was awarded the 2020 GSA/DAAD Book Prize in History for her work West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands. The monograph was published with Oxford University Press last year. Read the GSA/DAAD committee’s appreciation of Dr. Eckert’s work below.
“Astrid M. Eckert’s book achieves what all innovative history aspires to do: open new sight lines that advance both conceptual and empirical knowledge. The book focuses on the ‘Zonenrandgebiete’ created in Germany by the Iron Curtain: peripheral regions whose socioeconomic development accorded neither with the storyline of the ‘economic miracle’ nor with the political narratives of Bonn and West Berlin. The brilliance of Eckert’s book lies in demonstrating the centrality of these peripheral areas. Despite their backwater status as the ‘east of the west,’ the borderlands exerted substantial force in reconstituting the West-German state. By reimagining the cultural landscape of West Germany’s social and political development, Eckert’s extensively researched study marks a signal contribution to the fields of local and regional, German and European history. Eckert is alive to the lived social experience of borderland actors and the evolving conditions that acted upon them.“
Suddler Edits Special Edition of ‘The American Historian’: “History for Black Lives”
Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor, edited the September issue of The American Historian. The volume features seven articles on “History for Black Lives” contextualize the nationwide protests that occurred in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. The special issue is open for a limited time to the general public, regardless of OAH membership, here.
Ernest Freeberg (PhD, 1995) Publishes ‘A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement’
Dr. Ernest Freeberg (PhD, 1995), Professor and Department Head in the History Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, recently published A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement with Basic Books. Freeberg has authored three award-winning books. Read a summary of his newest below.
In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in streets that were dirty and dangerous to man and beast alike. As more people squeezed into crowded cities, their need for animals only grew—for energy and food, companionship and entertainment. At the same time, animals came to be associated with filth and disease and were often subject to cruel treatment and the worst abuses of human exploitation. The industrial city brought suffering, but it also inspired a compassion for animals that fueled a controversial anti-cruelty movement.
In A TRAITOR TO HIS SPECIES: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement (Basic Books; September 22, 2020), award-winning historian Ernest Freeberg tells the fascinating story of the eccentric aristocrat who launched a then-shocking campaign to bring rights to animals. In 1866, Henry Bergh founded New York’s American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), the nation’s first animal welfare organization, and successfully promoted an anticruelty law that paved the way for similar legislation across the country. Bergh and his corps of badge-wielding agents staged dramatic arrests and put abusers on trial, provoking public debate about our obligation to other species.
Sean Wempe (PhD, 2015) Publishes ‘Chronic Disparities: Public Health in Historical Perspective’ with Oxford UP
Dr. Sean Wempe, a 2015 alumnus of the History PhD program, has published his second book with Oxford University Press. The timely book – Chronic Disparities: Public Health in Historical Perspective – follows Wempe’s 2019 Revenants of the German Empire:
Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations. Wempe is Assistant Professor at California State University Bakersfield. Read more about Chronic Disparities below.
Chronic Disparities: Public Health in Historical Perspective begins with a controversial and pressing issue facing students today: how have public health initiatives challenged and/or reinforced societal inequalities of race, class, and gender? It explores the cultural, political, religious, demographic, and economic effects both government and private public-health practices have had on inequalities of race, class, and gender in an increasingly globalizing society, from the pre-Modern era to the present.
Chronic Disparities examines events and processes including the emergence of public health and sanitation in Europe; the coercive globalization of systems of health; colonial medicine and the selective application of “Western” medical policy; eugenics; responses to substance abuse; the AIDS/HIV pandemic; and many more. It includes a series introduction that explains this innovative approach to learning history and a conclusion that offers a model for applying the approach in seeking to understand other public health policies, events, and crises.