Congratulations to Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, 2018-2021 Winship Distinguished Research Professorship in History and Associate Professor, on winning an article prize with co-author Dr. Bianca Premo (Florida International University). The American Society for Legal History awarded their 2019 American Historical Review article, “A Court of Stick and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” with the Jane Burbank Article Prize. The prize is awarded annually to the best article in regional, global, imperial, comparative, or transnational legal history.
Image credit: Jacques Nicolas Bellin, Carte de la coste orientale d’Afrique depuis le Cap de Bonne Esperance jusqu’au Cap del Gada (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Libraries, 1740), islandora:19752, Islandora Repository, University of Cape Town Digital Collections.
Congratulations to History graduate student Anjuli Webster on winning the 2019-20 Francis S. Benjamin prize for her paper, “From extraction to enclosure: Delagoa Bay as aqueous borderland in the nineteenth century.” The paper traces the history of failed British claims to Portuguese Delagoa Bay in south Eastern Africa over the nineteenth century. Through disputes over geography, jurisdiction, and possession of this imperial outpost, the border between what would become Mozambique and South Africa slowly and episodically coalesced long before the territorial carve up of Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884.
The Benjamin prize was established in early 1974 in memory of Francis Benjamin who taught at Emory from 1946 till 1973. This gift is used to reward the best paper written by a graduate student during their first two years in the Emory History PhD program. View previous winners of the prize here.
Emory’s 2020 Homecoming virtual program featured 2018 History PhD alumna Claudia Kreklau, currently Associate Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St. Andrews. Kreklau spoke as a part of the program “A Taste of Emory from Around the World,” which was organized by Emory International Advancement and Constituent Engagement. Dr. Brian Vick advised Kreklau’s dissertation, titled “‘Eat as the King Eats’: Making the Middle Class through Food, Foodways, and Food Discourses in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Read more about the Homecoming program below and watch Dr. Kreklau’s presentation (Emory credentials required) here.
Take an exciting journey around the world to learn about the fascinating work of three international alumni working in the food and beverage industry. Discover how Jamie Koh 07B founded Singapore’s first stand-alone, micro-distillery for gin. Hear how Digant Kapoor 10Ox 12C is helping to expand sustainable farming in Dubai. And, learn the unique history of food from Claudia Kreklau 16G 18G.
Please join us this coming Thursday, November 5, at 4:20pm to learn about the latest history honors research projects. Three undergraduates, Ayriel Coleman, Brian Shan, and Colin Hutton, will present their work on the history of drug use in America, the racialization of Chinese Americans, and gardening in West Virginia coal mining towns. If you have not received the zoom link via email, please contact Prof. Eckert at aeckert [at] emory [dot] edu
Undergraduate students and faculty gathered on Wednesday, October 28, 2020, for a virtual workshop to discuss a chapter from Assistant Professor Maria R. Montalvo‘s book Archive of the Enslaved: Power, Enslavement, and the Production of the Past. The conversation focused on enslaved people, illness, and commodification in the antebellum courtroom.
Third-year graduate student Robert Billups has been awarded a Moody Research Grant for his current project, titled “White Supremacist Bombings and Arsons Against U.S. Civil Rights Institutions, 1940-1975.” The grant, which is underwritten by The Moody Foundation and awarded by a faculty committee from the University of Texas at Austin, will support Billups as he conducts research at the LBJ Presidential Library. Billups is advised by Joseph Crespino, History Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor, and Allen Tullos, Professor and Co-Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.
Please join us this coming Thursday, October 29, at 4:20pm to learn about the latest history honors research projects. Three students, Cameron Katz, Sun Woo Park, and Ryan Kelly, will present their work on felon disenfranchisement in Florida, the time of South Korea’s president Kim Dae-jung at Emory, and the representation of syphilis in Renaissance art. If you have not received the zoom link via email, please contact Prof. Eckert at aeckert [at] emory [dot] edu.
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.
“Judith Miller, an associate history professor at Emory University who teaches a class on “fake news,” tracked Operation Not Forgotten’s course on social media and in news coverage as it evolved into descriptions of a “criminal enterprise” on cable TV news shows, then became a subject of the false mythology of QAnon.”
