Category / Research

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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.”

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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.  

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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!

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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.

 

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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).

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Harvard UP Publishes Q&A with Sharon T. Strocchia about “Forgotten Healers”

Harvard University Press recently published a Q&A with Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, about her newest book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard UP, 2019). The exchange, which was published as part of Women’s History Month, outlines the major themes and historiographic contributions of Strocchia’s monograph. Read the piece on the Harvard UP Blog: “Q&A with Sharon Strocchia.”

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Daniel Thomas (20C), History Major and Fox Center Honors Fellow, Writes About Separatism in Eastern Ukraine

Daniel Thomas, a senior double major in history and international studies, recently wrote a piece about his research on separatism in Eastern Ukraine for the blog of the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory. Thomas is a 2019-’20 Fox Center Humanities Honors Fellow, completing his honors thesis with a regional focus on the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. The thesis draws on archival research and interviews that Thomas conducted in Kyiv in 2019. Associate Professor Matthew Payne is Thomas’ adviser. Read an excerpt from the post on the Fox Center’s blog below along with the full piece: “Neighbors against Neighbors: A historical study of separatist groups and rhetoric in Eastern Ukraine.”

The Fox Center’s generous grant has afforded me both the privilege of working in a tightly-knit epistemic community and the ability to conduct further research into my topic. The lump sum that I received as a part of my fellowship helped fund my interview-collecting over the Winter Break in Kyiv. Hearing the lived experiences of the Donbas’ denizens contributed a great deal to this project. I spoke with refugees and former separatist affiliates who dealt first-hand with the destructive repercussions of Donbasian separatism. Their accounts and lives illustrated that identity is more of a practice in subjectivity than it is an objective truth. Although my interviewees admitted that the separatist cause was rooted in a real problem (the callousness many politicians, both in Eastern and Western Ukraine, had towards the poor), they also admit that the separatists’ cause did little to ameliorate the Donbas’ desperate situation. Instead, it amplified it, displacing millions upon millions of Donbasians from their homeland. Without their insight, this thesis would have been at best a clueless meditation on a “forgotten” conflict…

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Rogers and Manuel Publish Op-Ed in ‘The Brazilian Report’

Thomas D. Rogers, Arthur Blank/NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History, recently published an opinion editorial with his collaborator Jeffrey T. Manuel in The Brazilian Report. The piece, titled “U.S. ethanol industry should take a leaf out of São Paulo’s book,” explores how ethanol policy and programs in São Paulo, Brazil, could inform energy administration in the United States. Rogers and Manuel are writing a transnational study of ethanol policy in Brazil and the U.S. Read the full article (paywall protected): “U.S. ethanol industry should take a leaf out of São Paulo’s book.”

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Department of History Workshop to Feature ‘Ethanol Lands’ by Rogers and Co-Author Manuel (CANCELLED)

The next meeting of the History Department Workshop will feature Dr. Thomas D. Rogers’s current book project, “Ethanol Lands: Energy, Agriculture, and Sustainability in the United States and Brazil.” Rogers is co-authoring the book with Dr. Jeffrey T. Manuel, Associate Professor of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The workshop will take place on Friday, March 20, from 12-1:30pm in the Major Seminar Room. Please RSVP to Becky Herring (becky [dot] herring [at] emory [dot] edu) if you plan to attend. image002

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Schainker, Yates Featured Among Emory’s Robust Contingent of Fulbright Scholars

Emory University was recently named a top producer of Fulbright scholars by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Six professors and administrators were awarded Fulbright Scholar Awards in 2019-20. Those awardees include Dr. Ellie R. Schainker, Arthur Blank Family Foundation Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies. Schainker will conduct research in Israel and Lithuania for her current project, “Rites of Empire: Jewish Religious Reforms in Imperial Russia, 1850-1917.” Read our earlier story about Dr. Schainker’s project: “Schainker Wins Fulbright Global Scholarship and Fellowship at Moscow’s Jewish Museum & Tolerance Center.”

The awardees also include former academic department administrator Kelly Yates, who is now assistant director of the Halle Institute for Global Research. Yates received a Fulbright position in the U.S.-Germany International Education Administrators Program, which creates links with the societal, cultural and higher education systems of other countries.

Read about the other awardees in the last year from the Emory News Center: “Emory named a top producer of Fulbright Scholars.”