Category / Research

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

Graduate Student Ashley Tan Researches Jewish Communities in East and Southeast Asia

In the summer of 2024, History PhD student Ashley Tan received funding from Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies to conduct research on Jewish communities in East and Southeast Asia. He wrote a reflection on his summer experience, which includes a fascinating discussion of his search for a centuries-old Kaifeng Jewish community, in a piece for the Tam Institute’s website.

In parallel to his history coursework, Tan is working towards a Jewish Studies Graduate Certificate. He is also a Brickman-Levin Fellow of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Young NUS Fellow of the National University of Singapore, and a Yenching Scholar of the Yenching Academy of Peking University. Tonio Andrade, Professor of History, serves as Tan’s advisor.

Read an excerpt from the Tam Institute piece below along with the full reflection.

“With the help from the Tam Institute’s research grants, I have had the chance to visit and conduct research on a number of different Jewish communities in East and Southeast Asia. The community that I will be focusing on in this article is one that is relatively more well-known but has largely faded into obscurity in recent years: the Kaifeng Jews. Although I have seen mentions of this community in passing when I read scholarship about Jewish history or when I visited different Jewish museums, detailed information about this community, especially regarding its recent history, is quite scanty. This puzzled me as the Kaifeng Jewish community is one of the oldest Jewish communities in Asia, dating back at least to the Song dynasty that existed around 1000 years ago when Kaifeng was the imperial capital, so I knew I had to go see it for myself.“

by emoryhistorydept

Strocchia Receives SIHS Senior Scholar Citation

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, has been selected as the recipient of this year’s Society for Italian Historical Studies Senior Scholar Citation. The award recognizes Strocchia’s “profound contributions to the study of Italian history – as a researcher, teacher, and mentor – and the esteem of her peers, colleagues, and students in the field.” Strocchia has authored or edited multiple books, including Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard UP, 2019), which won prizes from the Society for Italian Historical Studies, the Renaissance Society of America, and the History of Science Society. 

by emoryhistorydept

Becca de Los Santos Wins AHA Prize for Undergraduate Research

First-year graduate student Becca De Los Santos has been awarded the American Historical Association’s Raymond J. Cunningham Prize, given annually for the best article published in a journal and written by an undergraduate student. She published the prize-winning article, “Inversion of the Top-Down Operation: Enslaved Voices and French Abolitionism in 1840s Senegal,” in the Spring 2024 edition of Herodotus while in her senior year at Stanford University. Her related undergraduate honors work also received accolades. Titled “‘Poor Souls’ and ‘Dangerous Vagabonds’: The Enslaved Pursuit of Liberation in Post-Abolition Senegal, 1848-1865,” her thesis received the Josephine Baker Undergraduate Honors Thesis Prize and the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts at Stanford.

As a first-year doctoral student, Becca is interested in slavery, abolition, and emancipatory trajectories in the nineteenth-century French Empire. In particular, she seeks to examine how individuals negotiated their livelihoods after emancipation through laws and customs. Her geographic areas of interest include Senegal, Réunion, French Guiana, and Guadeloupe. Her faculty advisers are Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais.

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

Welcoming New Doctoral Students

The Emory History Department is excited to welcome six new doctoral students to the department in the fall 2024 semester. The students’ specializations encompass – and compellingly transcend – an array of geographic, thematic, and chronological borders. Read abridged profiles of the new graduate cohort below and follow the links to read their full biographies on the History Department website.

Jessica Alvarez Starr received her B.A. (Spanish and History) and M.A. (Latin American Studies) from the University of Florida. Her undergraduate and master’s research focused on antislavery and anticolonial activism in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, topics that she plans to expand upon for her dissertation. Her graduate work will be advised by Drs. Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis.

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Becca de los Santos received her B.A. (French and History) from Stanford University. As an undergraduate she worked on the Senegal Liberations Project and conducted research in France and Senegal for her prize-winning honors thesis. Her graduate research interests include slavery, abolition, and emancipatory trajectories in the nineteenth-century French Empire, especially Senegal, Réunion, French Guiana, and Guadeloupe. Drs. Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais will advise her work.

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Minju Kang received her B.A. from Ajou University and M.A. Seoul National University. Her master’s work focused on early modern Japan, particularly the impact of shogunate and domain policies on a small city in the Kantō region. Kang’s dissertation is tentatively titled “State Power and Local Society: Shogunate-Domain Relations in Japan’s Transition from the Early Modern to the Modern Era.” Drs. Laura Nenzi and Tonio Andrade will advise Kang’s work.

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Tymesha-Elizabeth Kindell received her B.A. in History and Sustainable Development from Columbia University. A native of Atlanta, her research centers on race, social, and sports movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century U.S., especially in the American South during the New South Era. Drs. Carl Suddler and Jason Morgan Ward will advise Kindell’s work.

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Pauli Purim Manfredini received her B.A. and M.A. from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná. Her research focuses on histories of gender and health, particularly in twentieth-century Brazil. Her dissertation is tentatively titled, “From Menstruation to Menopause: The Medicalization of Women’s Bodies in Early 20th-Century Brazil.” Drs. Jeffrey Lesser, Thomas D. Rogers, and Kylie M. Smith will advise her work.

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Yuan Wang received his B.A. from Anhui University and master’s degrees from Shanghai International Studies University and Duke University. His research tracks China’s unique developmental path to modern prosperity in a global context and since early modern period. His doctoral work will examine China’s silk industry and its maritime trade, particularly from 1540 to 1690. Wang’s graduate work will be advised by Drs. Tonio Andrade and Laura Nenzi.

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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

Lowery, Cahoon Family Endowed Chair Featured by Emory 2036 Campaign

Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, the Cahoon Family Professor of American History, was recently featured as part of the Emory 2036 campaign. The video feature discusses Lowery’s background and work since arriving at Emory in 2021, including her leading scholarship in the field of indigenous studies, creative practice as a filmmaker, and work building transformative partnerships with indigenous communities. The feature also describes the origins and significance of the Cahoon Family endowed chair, including with commentary by emeritus trustee Susan Cahoon 68C. Watch the full feature below:

Malinda Maynor Lowery featured in an Emory 2036 campaign video.