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.
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.
Dr. Judith Miller and sophomore history major Edina Hartstein tracked a disturbing recent news item about an alleged child smuggling ring. Their work was cited in the Atlanta Journal Constitution article, “Feds cobbled criminal cases together in missing children operation, creating false perception.” Read an excerpt from the article below along with more about Miller’s course on “fake news” via the Emory News Center’s feature from last year, “‘Fake News’ class helps students learn to research and identify false information.”
“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.”
Congratulations to Dr. Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Law and the Humanities, on being named a Winship Distinguished Research Professor for 2020-23. LaChance is an expert in twentieth century American legal history and culture. The Winship Distinguished Research Award is given to tenured faculty who demonstrate singular accomplishments in research and is designed to encourage further scholarly research and research-based teaching.
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.“
In the fall 2020 semester Emory inaugurated the Arts and Social Justice (ASJ) Fellowship program, which pairs Emory faculty and students with Atlanta artists to examine how creative thinking and artistic expression can inspire positive social change. One of the recipients of the inaugural fellowship is Hank Klibanoff, the director and co-teacher of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project and the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism. Klibanoff is paired with actor Garrett Turner, an Emory alumnus as well as former Woodruff and Bobby Jones Scholar. Their work will center on the lives and times of known victims of the 1906 Atlanta race massacre. Read more about the collaboration and the other members of the inaugural ASJ cohort here: “Emory faculty, students join forces with Atlanta artists to explore social justice.”
Dr. Deborah Dinner, Associate Professor of Law and associated faculty in the History Department, has received two fellowships this year. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) awarded Dinner the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, which she will use at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress, in 2022-2023. In addition, Dinner received the the Law and Public Affairs Fellowship from Princeton University, where she will hold a visiting, residential appointment for the academic year 2020-21. Read more about these awards and Dinner’s work here.
Over the past academic year History Department faculty and graduate and undergraduate students received numerous grants from Emory’s Halle Institute for Global Research. View the History Department awardees and their projects below, and see the full list of Halle grant recipients from across Emory’s campuses.
URC-Halle International Research Award:
Halle-CFDE Global Atlanta Innovative Teaching (GAIT) Grant:
Undergraduate Global Research Fellows, 2020-21:
Graduate Global Research Fellows, 2020-21: