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.
Category / Research
Eckert’s ‘West Germany and the Iron Curtain’ Wins 2020 GSA/DAAD Book Prize
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.“
Klibanoff Awarded New Arts and Social Justice Fellowship
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.”
Dinner Awarded Fellowships from ACLS and Princeton
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.
History Faculty and Students Receive Grants from The Halle Institute for Global Research
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:
- Astrid M. Eckert – “Germany and the Global Commons: Environment, Diplomacy, and the Market”
- Pablo Palomino – “Carnivore Capitalism: A Global Cultural History of Argentine Beef”
Halle-CFDE Global Atlanta Innovative Teaching (GAIT) Grant:
- Pablo Palomino – “Soccer and Globalization”
Undergraduate Global Research Fellows, 2020-21:
- Nayive Gaytán – “Disappearing Acts?: Pueblos Mágicos and the Politics of Erasure,” Emory College of Arts and Sciences: Spanish and History
Graduate Global Research Fellows, 2020-21:
- Georgia Brunner – “Cultivating a Nation: Gender and the Political Economies of Nationalism in Late Colonial Rwanda”
Yannakakis and Premo Discuss Law, its Spaces, and its Practitioners in Colonial Mexico and Peru
Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Associate Professor of History, recently published a conversation about law in colonial Latin America with Dr. Bianca Premo, Professor of History at Florida International University. Their piece is published as a part of the History and the Law Project within the Exchanges of Economic, Legal and Political Ideas Programme. The conversation includes discussion of Yannakakis’s digital project, “Power of Attorney,” which we featured in 2018: “Recent Faculty Publications: Q & A with Yanna Yannakakis about ‘Power of Attorney.’”
Read the piece by Yannakakis and Premo here: “On not going to court in colonial Spanish America: A conversation between Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis.”
Fox Center Fellow Junyi Han (20C) Researches Post-WWII Collective Memory in China
Senior Junyi Han, a History and Media Studies double major, recently contributed a post to the Fox Center Fellows’ blog about her research. Han is completing her honors thesis on collective memory of World War II in China with a micro-historical study of the Tengchong Guoshang Cemetery, the earliest and largest burial ground in mainland China for Guomindang soldiers killed in World War II. Read the Fox Center’s biography of Han below along with the full article, “Guoshang Cemetery and Chinese Collective Memory, 1945 and Beyond.”
Junyi Han is a senior double majoring History and Media Studies. She is currently working on an honors thesis that examines war memories through the case of the Chinese Expeditionary Forces, a military unit dispatched to Burma and India by the Nationalist government in 1942 in support of the Allied efforts against Japanese invasion in Asia. The thesis will answer how and why the war efforts of the Chinese Expeditionary Force started to be recognized in mainland China in the late twentieth century. It will explore how war memories and post-war politics have mutually shaped each other, and thus provide new insights into contemporary Chinese history.
History Major Ellie Coe Receives 2020 ECLC Excellence in Language Studies Award in Russian
Congratulations to history major Ellie Coe, the recipient of the 2020 ECLC Excellence in Language Studies Award in Russian. Last year, Coe received a Clio Prize for Best Research Paper in a Freshman Seminar for her work, “A Mythic Spaceman: The Cultural Influence of Yuri Gagarin.” Below, the Emory College Language Center offers details on Coe’s work and the award:
Coe is a second-year studying History and Russian & East European Studies. She first began learning Russian in high school under the tutelage of a private teacher, and immediately fell in love with the language and culture. Through her Russian language classes at Emory, Ellie has discovered a passion for Russian poetry of the early 20th century; her favorite Russian writer is Vladimir Mayakovsky. Specializing in Soviet history, Ellie is interested in studying the Soviet space program, which launched the first man into space in 1961. In October 2019, she was able to put her Russian skills to use when she interviewed five cosmonauts at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for an independent research project. Ellie is grateful to her professors Dr. Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Dr. Juliette Stapanian-Apkarian, and Dr. Matthew Payne for encouraging her to follow her passion!
Ashley Parcells (PhD, ’18) Receives NEH Summer Stipend
Dr. Ashley Parcells, Assistant Professor of History at Jacksonville State University, has received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The support will allow Parcells to complete interviews and two chapters for a book on apartheid and sovereignty in KwaZulu, South Africa. Her project is titled “Ethnicity, State-Building, and the Making of Apartheid, ca. 1951 to 1994.” Parcells completed her doctorate in 2018, with Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor and Director of the Institute of African Studies, serving as her primary dissertation adviser.
Hannah Abrahamson Wins AHA’s Beveridge Research Grant
4th-year doctoral student Hannah Abrahamson was recently awarded a Beveridge Research Grant from the American Historical Association. Abrahamson is a historian of colonial Mexico writing a dissertation entitled, “Women of the Encomienda: Households and Dependents in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Yucatan, Mexico.” The Beveridge grant supports research in the history of the Western Hemisphere (the United States, Canada, and Latin America).