Category / Research

by emoryhistorydept

Emory News Features Cross-Disciplinary, Collaborative Research among Lesser and Students


The Emory News Center recently published a feature story about the research led by Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, in the Bom Retiro neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil. Headlined “Understanding health, history and environment in urban Brazil,” the piece highlights the innovative methods that inform Lesser’s work, including for his most recent book, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2025). The article also describes the productive cross-disciplinary collaborations that Lesser has cultivated with graduate and undergraduate students, including second-year doctoral student Paula Manfredini and History honors student Lucia Alexeyev.

Find an excerpt of the piece below, and read the full article.

“Lesser, who frequently visits the neighborhood accompanied by student researchers who are just as likely to be medical, theology or public health scholars as history majors, researches the historical dimensions of how health problems arise — not just via germs or disease, but also from the many different ways people live their daily lives within the urban environment. This unusual approach brings his team into contact with a wide variety of individuals who shape public health, including policymakers, street-level health teams and and ordinary people from diverse backgrounds.

‘Being a historian is a great way to be left alone,’ says Lesser, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin American History at Emory. ‘But I started to realize I would be a better scholar if I was surrounded by people who had different expertise than my own, who challenged me as opposed to my doing it all in my own head.‘”

by emoryhistorydept

Cerveira Wins AHA’s Beveridge Grant in Western Hemisphere History


Bruna Digiacomo Cerveira, fourth-year doctoral candidate in Latin American history, received the 2026 Beveridge Family Research Grant in Western Hemisphere History from the American Historical Association. The grant will support research for her dissertation project, “Liberated African Children Between Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and British Imperialism in Rio de Janeiro, 1831–1888.” Cerveira is among just eleven graduate students in history nationwide to receive the AHA’s Beveridge grant this cycle. Her dissertation is advised by Drs. Mariana P. Candido and Thomas D. Rogers.

by emoryhistorydept

Celebrating 2026 History Department Graduates


Emory’s 2026 Commencement ceremonies took place May 7-11, 2026, and the History Department had many reasons to celebrate. 25 History undergraduate majors or joint majors walked across the stage. Seven of those, after completing compelling original theses under the advisement of dedicated faculty, graduated with honors in History.

Latin American History doctoral candidate Alejandro Guardado defended his dissertation, titled “Indigenous Intellectuals, Cultural Brokers, and the Struggle for Native Self-Determination in Late Twentieth-Century Oaxaca, Mexico.” Kaelyn McAdam, a doctoral student in Ancient history, completed her dissertation, “Understanding the Graeculi: A Greek Roman Empire in the Third and Fourth Centuries,” and graduated in the summer of 2025. Five other graduate students received their interim master’s.

Departmental leadership, faculty, and staff celebrate these exceptional, collective accomplishments of the 2025-’26 academic year.

Expand the sections below to learn more about the graduating and degree-receiving students. Also catch a replay of the 2026 Emory College Honors Ceremony and browse photos of the Commencement ceremonies.

The following graduate students received their interim master’s degree:

Bruna Digiacomo Cerveira Coutinho (Summer 2025)
Co-advisors: Mariana Candido and Thomas D. Rogers


Gerardo Manrique de Lara Ruiz (Summer 2025)
Co-advisors: Mariana Candido and Clifton Crais


Rene K. Odanga (Summer 2025)
Co-advisors: Mariana Candido and Clifton Crais


Emilie Cunning (Fall 2025)
Co-Advisors: Mary L. Dudziak and Jason Morgan Ward


Yuan Zeng Ashley Tan (Fall 2025)
Advisor: Tonio Andrade

The following undergraduates completed either a major or joint major in History and were recognized at the 2026 commencement:

Lucia Kumari Alexeyev
Adrien Jonah Dolin Armstrong
Daniel Hays Bell
Kennedie Amanda Black
Ciera Merie Butler
Edmund Humphrey Cayley
Georgios Drakos
Chloe Nanci Glazer
Mya D. Green*
Isaac Paul Jaye
Jiarui Jiang
Thora Jordt
Alice Liu**
Victoria Mia Maza
Isabella J. Mazet
Lola Kate McGuire
Rachel Elizabeth Mehler
Javier Andres De Jesus Montano
Leo Abraham Raykher
Dylan Robert Sanders Villegas
Joel Moa Shin
Siya Sanjeev Thadani
Xipei Wan
Megan Xing
Yiqi Zhang

* Graduating summer 2026
** Graduating fall 2026

The following students completed honors thesis and graduated with honors in History.

Lucia Kumari Alexeyev, “Vieques Se Levanta: A History of Health Amidst Occupation”
Faculty Director: Professor Jeffrey Lesser

Daniel Bell, “Public Men in Glass Houses: Herbert Jenkins and the Remaking of the Atlanta Police Department, 1947-1972”
Faculty Director: Professor Joseph Crespino

Edmund Cayley, “The First East Turkestan Republic: The Rise of 20th Century Uyghur Nationalism”
Faculty Director: Professor Matthew Payne

Lola McGuire, “‘This stand I make is not alone’: Uncovering the Chicago Young Patriots Organization Women, 1968-1973”
Faculty Director: Professor Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez

Leo Raykher, “Economics, Espionage, Exile: The Surveilled Life of David Drucker, Esq.”
Faculty Director: Professor Jonathan Prude

Siya Thadani, “Medicalizing Difference: Science and the Making of Race in the British Empire”
Faculty Director: Professor Chris Suh

Thomas Wan, “For the Nation and the Revolution: Inner Mongols in the Shadow of Empire and Civil War (1931-49)”
Faculty Director: Professor Matthew Payne

by emoryhistorydept

Doctoral Candidate Emilie Cunning Publishes Article in ‘Modern American History’


Earlier this spring Doctoral candidate Emilie Cunning published an article titled “The Making of a Militarized War on Poverty: The Effort to Triangulate Military Service, Crime Prevention, and Social Citizenship through Project 100,000 and Project Transition” in the journal Modern American History. Cunning interprets these two programs, which focused on the military recruitment and rehabilitation of low-IQ men, as sitting at the nexus between the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam. Cunning’s graduate work is advised by Drs. Daniel LaChance and Mary L. Dudziak.

Separately, Cunning was recently accepted to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Summer Institute for ABD candidates. Held at the Ohio State University and hosted by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Summer 2026 Institute is co-directed by Christopher McKnight Nichols (Ohio State) and Andrew Preston (University of Virginia).

Read the abstract from Cunning’s Modern American History article below and find the full version here.

This article explores the programs known as Project 100,000 and Project Transition developed within the Johnson administration during the Vietnam War. Viewing them as the intersection between the War on Poverty and the War in Vietnam, this article contends with how these programs were designed to serve the goals both of social uplift and crime prevention through the rehabilitation of low-IQ men via military service. The article analyzes the racialized aspects of these programs, as they were disproportionately composed of Black men, and questions the motivations behind the construction of Project 100,000 and Project Transition as a means of “transporting” America’s racial unrest abroad. At its core, the article argues that these programs were inherently at odds with the intense manpower demands of the Vietnam War and the reluctancies of military officials to properly train Project 100,000 men. The program formed another tragedy of the Vietnam era.

by emoryhistorydept

Alejandro Guardado Among Inaugural Recipients of Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Award


Alejandro Guardado, a 2026 graduate of the Latin American History doctoral program, has won the Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Award from Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. Guardado’s project is titled “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn, 1968–2000.”

Inaugurated in 2025, Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Awards honor the life and legacy of Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the Peruvian priest and theologian widely seen as the father of Latin American liberation theology. The award supports projects in theology, history, and the social sciences that engage or take inspiration from Gutiérrez’s work on the preferential option for the poor.

Guardado was among five recipients in the first cycle of the award. Read more about the award and the recipients’ projects: “Cushwa Center announces 2026 research funding, including five inaugural Gutiérrez Research Awards.”

Guardado completed his dissertation under the advisement of Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Department Chair.

by emoryhistorydept

Kreklau (PhD, ’18) Publishes Article in ‘German Studies Review’


Dr. Claudia Kreklau, a 2018 doctoral program alum and Honorary Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews, has published a new article in the journal German Studies Review. Titled “Masters of Food: Climate Crisis and Optimized Exploitation in an Atlantic Hinterland Before the Revolutions of 1848,” the work examines how dietary control and prescription served as a means for social control in a time of extreme climatic crisis.

Kreklau published her first book, The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910, with Berghahn Books earlier this year. The book as well as the new article originated in a research paper that Kreklau completed during coursework at Emory. Termed the “P-Paper” and produced by every graduate student before candidacy, this milestone helps students to develop their dissertation projects and lays the foundation for academic publication early in doctoral training.

Read the abstract of the German Studies Review article below along with the full piece here.

In 1818, the manorial lord Ludwig Ellrichshausen used his agricultural estate in Maisenhälden as a laboratory for optimized economic exploitation during a period of extreme climatic crisis. He designed a minimum-feed diet for his workers that was low in protein, devoid of fruits and vegetables, and insufficient in calories to support hard physical labor with the goal of engineering their bare subsistence to maximize outputs. The Speisemeister’s or master of food’s dietary prescription functioned as a means of social control in this Atlantic Hinterland, constructed to communicate social positioning via the symbolically charged means of food.

by emoryhistorydept

Fox Center Honors Fellows Bell and Raykher Present Theses


Senior History majors Daniel Bell and Leo Raykher recently presented their honors theses as part of the 2025-’26 cohort of Fox Center Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellows. A senior double-majoring in Economics, Bell’s thesis examines the life and career of Herbert Jenkins, Atlanta’s influential twentieth-century police chief. Raykher’s research explores espionage, surveillance, and political freedom in the United States through the life of his great, great-uncle, David Drucker, a strident advocate for socialist causes and political exile in Mexico.

Both projects echo the Fox Center’s 2025-’26 theme, Life/Story, which “draws its inspiration from the many ways humanities fields and disciplines often approach a single life as the entry point for examining broad political, socio-cultural, and historical phenomena.”

by emoryhistorydept

Byrnes (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘The United States and the Ends of Empire’


Dr. Sean T. Byrnes, a 2014 graduate of the doctoral program in U.S. history, recently published his second book, The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776, with Bloomsbury Press. The four-century history examines the relationship between the United States, empire, and decolonization from the revolutionary war through the present.

Fellow Emory History Department alum Dr. Elizabeth Stice (Palm Beach Atlantic University) recently interviewed Byrnes about his new monograph. Find their conversation here: “Interview with Sean Byrnes, author of ‘The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776.’”

Byrnes’s research centers on U.S. politics, international relations, and global economic inequality. His first book, Disunited Nations: U.S. Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, was published by LSU Press in 2021. His writings have also appeared in Time, The New Republic, Dissent, Jacobin, Diplomatic History, Diplomatica, International Journal, and for the History News Network. He hosts conversations with authors on the New Books Network, serves on the Board of Editors for Federal History, and is a Section Editor for the newly released Routledge Online Encyclopedia of the Cold War.

Byrnes completed his doctoral training under the advisement of Dr. Fraser Harbutt.

Read an abstract of the Byrnes’s new book below and learn more via Bloomsbury Press.

Few topics are more important to understanding the origins of the modern world than decolonization, and few countries have played a more important role in that history than the United States.In this book, Sean T. Byrnes provides a definitive, single-volume account of the relationship between the United States, decolonization, and world order.

Through a lively narrative history that ranges across four centuries, Byrnes reveals how the process of ending and replacing empires defined the American relationship to the world from the colonial era to the present. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution, hierarchies born of the imperial age—and defined by ideas about race, capitalism, and civilization—fundamentally shaped American views of who was entitled to sovereignty and when. Therefore, far from building a world of “Westphalian” sovereign equality, the United States instead manipulated, expanded, and then attempted to dominate globe spanning structures of wealth and power that served the few at the expense of the many.

From early interactions with Native Americans and a decolonizing Latin America, to efforts to bolster global hierarchies after the World Wars and influence the postcolonial “Third World”, The United States and the Ends of Empire, tells the story of a US that may not always have embraced formal empire but nevertheless still sought to organize the world in imperial ways. In the process, it reveals how Americans helped build today’s modern, globalized world—and the unequal hierarchies of wealth and power that define it.

by emoryhistorydept

History Major Rafael Escoto Publishes Paper in ‘Central Europe Yearbook’


Junior history major Rafi Escoto recently published a paper in the Central Europe Yearbook, an open-access journal promoting the study of Central Europe among undergraduate students. Titled “Everything Old is New Again: Border Rituals and the Return of History in ‘Green Border,’” Escoto’s paper analyses Agnieszka Holland’s 2023 film about refugees from the Middle East and Africa who attempt to reach the European Union, only to become caught up in a geopolitical crisis triggered by the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.

Escoto initially wrote this paper in “HIST 145: The History of Now,” which is taught by Profs. Matthew Payne and Astrid M. Eckert. Find the abstract below, and read the complete work here: “Everything Old is New Again: Border Rituals and the Return of History in ‘Green Border.‘”

This paper argues that Green Border (2023), directed by Agnieszka Holland, transforms the Polish-Belarusian border into a site of moral ritual, where sacred violence replaces humanitarian law. Using Durkheim’s theories, Eastern European memory studies, and analyses of populism and asylum policy, the paper interprets the film as a historical recurrence rather than a modern crisis. Drawing on scholars like Törnquist-Plewa, Exeler, and Krastev, the analysis reveals how Europe’s border politics ritualize exclusion and revive authoritarian patterns under democratic guise. Methods include close film analysis and engagement with secondary literature on EU identity, populism, and the symbolic politics of migration.

by emoryhistorydept

Bhattacharyya (PhD, ’14) Investigates Climate Management History with Major Grant from Swiss National Science Foundation


Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya, a 2014 doctoral program alum, was recently awarded a competitive, multi-year grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for the project, “Climate Risk Management: A Historical Perspective.” The project investigates the role of financial institutions in the making of climate science, including by engaging financial institutions’ archives from the 18th century onward, and addresses the fundamental question, “Why have we overwhelmingly turned to the market to tackle the climate crisis?” The full abstract of the project follows:

This project explores why market-based tools – such as carbon trading, weather derivatives, parametric insurance, and catastrophe bonds – have become central to managing climate risk. Examining insurance archives from the eighteenth century onward, it analyzes how financial institutions shaped meteorological knowledge, risk measurement tools, underwriting policies and enforcement mechanisms. The research aims to explain how the business of risk management influenced evolving conceptions of climate and why market mechanisms, rather than regulation, dominate current climate-risk governance. 

Bhattacharyya is Professor of the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich. She is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History. She completed her doctorate under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.