Category / Research

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Q&A with 2021 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellow Camille Goldmon

Earlier this year PhD candidate Camille Goldmon was named a 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. In the following Q&A exchange, Goldmon offers more context about her dissertation, titled “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940.”

What was the genesis of your project, and how has it changed since you first entered graduate school?

I come from a background of Black farmers. My father is a third-generation farmer in Arkansas. I never gave it too much thought until I started noticing that everything I’d ever read about Black farmers was about sharecroppers. This prompted me to do more research on the origins of sharecropping in the US South for an undergraduate capstone paper. That’s when I started to realize the significance of agricultural landownership among Black southerners, particularly those in rural areas. I dug further into landowning African Americans and the challenges they faced for my master’s thesis. For my dissertation, however, I wanted to tell a slightly different story—one of overcoming challenges and dethroning systems of oppression. One that would better capture the narrative of people like my father, grandparents, and great-grandparents who tenaciously persisted in their pursuits of land, but would also shed light on the extent of obstacles deliberately designed to hinder them. That’s how I began focusing on grassroots agricultural activists and organizational leadership like that at Tuskegee Institute between 1881 and 1940. 

What has the research process during dissertation fieldwork been like? 

It goes without saying that the pandemic had totally changed the landscape of dissertation fieldwork, but luckily I’ve been able to get back into the archives over the past couple of months. There’s no way to describe the joy that comes from touching an archival source that you didn’t know existed, but fits perfectly into your research. 

How do digital humanities approaches figure into your work?

I mentioned wanting to expose the obstacles that Black farmers faced. These issues include disparate access to resources such as extension services, loans and grants, and tillable land. I can (and do) use census data, financial figures, and even dialogue to demonstrate the inequities and the effectiveness of efforts to dismantle systemic discrimination. However, I remember the first time I saw the 1939 Home Owners Loan Corporation Map of Chicago that showed redlining and segregated housing practices in the 1930s. And the first time I saw the diagram of the Brookes slave ship that illustrated how enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic. I knew about segregated housing and the inhumanity of the Middle Passage, but those visualizations completely upped the ante of my understanding. That’s why my dissertation has a digital component that functions as an online, open-access archive for digitized primary sources, GIS maps, and other visual aids that will hopefully deepen readers’ understanding of my work.

Are you partial to a particular chapter, section, or story from the project so far?

At this point, chapter designations are subject to change, but my favorite narrative thread in the entire project is that which follows individual farmers or farm families who advocated for themselves or used their landowning status to advocate for others. This includes farmers who opened their homes to visiting civil rights workers, which many African Americans in rural areas could not do without fear of eviction from white-owned land or being frozen out of jobs. It also includes those who joined organizations such as the Progressive Farmers and Households Union, Sharecroppers and Tenant Farmers Union, or Alabama Share Croppers Union at risk of violent reprisal against themselves and their families. I love having the privilege of telling these stories of strategy, community, and overall courageousness. 

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Strakhova Awarded Research Fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for European History

Docotral Candidate Anastasiia Strakhova has been awarded a residential research fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany. The fellowship will provide 12 months of support as Strakhova completes her dissertation, titled “Selective Emigration: Border Control and the Jewish Escape in Late Imperial Russia, 1881-1914.” Strakhova’s graduate work is advised by Drs. Eric Goldstein and Ellie R. Schainker.

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History Dept. Students and Faculty Receive Grants from Halle Institute

Emory’s Halle Institute for Global Research has awarded multiple undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members from the History Department with research funding throughout the 2020-’21 academic year. Directed by Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, the Halle Institute supports and promotes global research opportunities for faculty, students, and visiting scholars throughout all of Emory’s schools. See the History Department’s recipients and their funded projects below.

Rethinking Global Inequalities (with Goizueta Business and Society Institute)

Michelle Armstrong-Partida – “Singlewomen: Enslaved and Free in the Late Medieval Mediterranean”

Halle-CFDE Global Atlanta Innovative Teaching (GAIT) Grants

Adriana Chira – “Human Trafficking in World History”

URC-Halle International Research Awards in partnership with the University Research Council (URC)

Astrid M. Eckert – “Germany and the Global Commons: Environment, Diplomacy, and the Market”

Graduate Global Research Fellows

Georgia Brunner – Rwanda/Italy/Belgium      

Undergraduate Global Research Fellows

Bronwen Boyd – “The Signares of Senegambia: Slavery, “Progress,” and the French Colonial Project in the Nineteenth Century,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History, French Studies

Ellie Coe – “Unlikely Friendships: The Little-Known Meetings of Cosmonauts and Astronauts in the Early Space Age,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History, Russian and East European Studies

Alex Levine – “Dueling Dragons: Examining Welsh National Identity Through Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century British Imperial Involvement in China,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History

Annie Li – “A Comparative History of the Activism of Chinese American Churches and Taiwanese Churches,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History, Sociology

Willie Lieberman – “English Femininity in Purcell’s Operas,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History

Julien Nathan – “Who is the Nation: Analyzing the Relationship Between Gastarbeiter and the New Left Student Movement, 1960-1973,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: History

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Brunner Wins Fulbright for Research in Rwanda

Congratulations to doctoral candidate Georgia Brunner on being awarded a Fulbright to support her dissertation fieldwork in Rwanda. Brunner’s project is titled “Building a Nation: Gender, Colonialism, and the Struggle for a National Identity.” Her adviser is Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor of History. Read an abstract of Brunner’s project, as well as her plan of research and service activities for the year ahead, below.

At the intersection of gender studies, the history of empire, and the history of labor, this project elucidates the ways in which gender informed divergent nationalisms in late colonial and early postcolonial Rwanda. As migratory Rwandan men looked on from neighboring Uganda and Tanzania, women still in Rwanda were left with colonial forced labor obligations, building infrastructure and commercial coffee farms. Both conservative men abroad and liberal women at home thought of forced labor as an oppressive colonial regime but they had different visions for Rwanda’s future. While liberals, and liberal women in particular, hoped for reforms in education and voting rights, conservative men hoped to reinstate what they viewed as traditional norms — patriarchal nuclear families with women confined to the domestic sphere. These new nationalisms reveal the possibilities of late colonialism and the constraints of newly independent states. By investigating the gendered dynamics of labor and nationalism in late colonial Rwanda, this project adds crucial knowledge to the history of women in the formal economy, the creation of multiple nationalisms during decolonization processes, and the gendered politics of empires and postcolonial states.

Because of a close relationship with my host university, I have been planning a number of ways to engage with undergraduate and masters students. In talking with Father Balthazar Ntivuguruswa, the Vice Chancellor of my host institution The Catholic Institute of Kabayi, I have plans to work with social science masters students to create an oral history project and bank housed at the university based both on my own research and the interests of the students. Similarly, I have plans to work with undergraduate students at the university on English writing skills that will help them in finding internationally oriented jobs after graduating.

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Rall Wins Scobie Award from Conference on Latin American History

Congratulations to graduate student Ursula Rall on receiving the James R. Scobie award from the Conference on Latin American History. The Scobie provides up to $1,500 for an exploratory research trip abroad to determine the feasibility of a Ph.D. dissertation topic dealing with some facet of Latin American history. Rall’s project is entitled, “The Spatial Mobility of African and Afro-Descended Women in the Colonial Spanish Americas.” Rall is advised by Drs. Yanna Yannakakis and Javier Villa-Flores. Read more about the project and Rall’s field research plans below.

The pre-dissertation research I plan to do this summer will explore the migration patterns of free and enslaved women of African descent in the seventeenth century centered on urban New Spain. Depending on travel restrictions and archive access, this research will either happen in Mexico City or within the United States at the Gilcrease Museum and Tulane University Library. This archival work will help determine the feasibility of my dissertation work, in which I plan to the trace patterns of spatial mobility of free and enslaved women of African descent and the social connections they made and maintained.

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Cors and Goldmon Named Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows

Congratulations to doctoral candidates Alexander Cors and Camille J. Goldmon on being named 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows. Cors and Goldmon are among 72 graduate students nationwide to receive the fellowship, which supports the next generation of humanistic scholars in their final year of dissertation research and writing. Cors’s project, titled “Newcomers and New Borders: Migration, Property Formation, and Conflict over Land along the Mississippi River, 1750-1820,” offers a new perspective on the “periodization and geographies of North American history by viewing colonial expansion, Indigenous dispossession, and the rise of the slave-plantation economy as interconnected processes that spanned across national and imperial boundaries.” Goldmon’s project, “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940,” reexamines “historical figures typically dismissed as conservative, unprogressive, or even apathetic and positions them instead as harbingers of change responsive to the needs of local Black farmers.” Read more about their exciting work in the links above and browse the projects of the other fellows in the 2021 ACLS cohort.

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Dr. Abigail Meert (PhD, ’19) Wins NEH Fellowship

Congratulations to Dr. Abigail Meert, a 2019 PhD graduate in African history, on winning a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Meert received a summer stipend for her project “Suffering, Struggle, and the Politics of Legitimacy in Uganda, 1958–1996.” She will conduct archival research in Uganda and the United Kingdom along with semi-structured follow-up interviews with previous informants. The expected outcome of the research is an academic article as part of her book project on the Ugandan Civil War from 1981–1986. Meert is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M International University.

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Honors Student Cameron Katz Discusses Experience as Undergraduate Fellow at the Fox Center

History major and honors student Cameron Katz recently published a piece on the blog of Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry reflecting on her time as an undergraduate humanities fellow. Katz discusses her research, which centers on Florida’s felony disenfranchisement law, as well as how the pandemic has shaped her experience as a student and scholar. Read an excerpt from the post below, along with the full piece: “Shared Scholarship During the Pandemic.”

“The opportunity to present my research to a group of scholars was also very beneficial. My history honors thesis examines the racial implications of Florida’s felony disenfranchisement law – the rule which revokes a person’s right to vote on account of a felony conviction – which was on the books from 1838 to 2018. Because my temporal framework is so large, working to condense it to a short presentation for an audience less familiar with the history really helped me to streamline my main argument, which I think is one of the most challenging aspects of large projects. Hearing feedback about my presentation allowed me to narrow my presentation even further so that I could convey my work in an accessible and informative manner. Later this month, I will be presenting my research at the Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Symposium so the additional practice at the Fox Center has helped me to prepare.“

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Undergraduate Honors Students Present Thesis Proposals Throughout April

Throughout the month of April History majors at Emory are presenting their honors thesis proposals via Zoom. Their fifteen research projects range widely in period, place, and theme, from an analysis of African-American funeral directors in Jim Crow Georgia to a study of diplomatic relations between Russian cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts. Read about the student projects (including their faculty mentors) by clicking on the flyers below, and email Ms. Lakesia Hayes for the zoom link to the final round of presentations on Monday, April 26, from 2:40-4pm EDT.

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Lesser to Present Opening Lecture at Federal University of Paraná

Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Reserch, will deliver the opening lecture for the history graduate program at the Federal University of Paraná. Lesser’s lecture, titled “Structural Health: Immigrants, the State and Urban Geography in São Paulo, 1870-2020,” draws from his research based in the Bom Retiro neighborhood of the city of São Paulo. The lecture will be livestreamed on YouTube on April 28 at 4pm EDT.