Assistant Professor of History Tehila Sasson published an article entitled “A Truly Global Britain?” in the October 2018 edition of Journal of British Studies. The piece is part of a roundtable of historians who examine the emerging subfield of Britain and the World. In addition to her article, Sasson co-authored the introduction with James Vernon. Read Sasson’s contributions along with the full collection here: “Britain and the World: A New Field?”
Category / Research
Undergraduate Tyler Breeden Presents Findings from Fieldwork on American Relief Administration Operations in Russia
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpzZAutqTJg]
Undergraduate Tyler Breeden gave a video presentation describing his research and travel to the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, in the Summer of 2018. The fieldwork was funded by a Theodore H. Jack Award, which annually supports undergraduate research on a topic of American history in archives beyond Atlanta. Breeden’s research serves as the basis for his honors thesis on American Relief Administration Operations in Russia. Dr. Matt Payne, Associate Professor of History, is the advisor for the project.
Recent Faculty Publications: Q & A with Yanna Yannakakis about ‘Power of Attorney’
Associate Professor of History Yanna Yannakakis recently launched a digital publication entitled “Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico: Native People, Legal Culture, and Social Networks.” Yannakakis, who is a specialist of colonial Mexico and also holder of the Winship Distinguished Research Professorship in History (2018-2021), discusses the making of this innovative digital humanities project in the latest installment of “Recent Faculty Publications.” Read the Q & A below and check out the project here.
Extensive projects like these are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this project, from initial idea through final production.
I came up with the idea for this project in the fall of 2013. I had been researching indigenous legal culture in colonial Oaxaca, Mexico and had encountered dozens of letters of attorney – a simple and formulaic genre of notarial document — produced by native litigants in the state’s judicial archive. I noticed that in addition to information about native litigation, the letters contained spatial data, including the names of native communities and the locations of their legal representatives. I began to wonder if I could map the interethnic relationships and networks created by power of attorney across the space of the Spanish empire, from the remote highlands of Oaxaca to Madrid, Spain and places in-between. I brought my research questions to Emory’s Center for Digital Studies, which serves as an incubator for digital projects, and in collaboration with my colleagues at ECDS, we developed a research plan and method. We launched the pilot for the project in May 2018, and the work is ongoing.
Digital humanities projects often entail collaborative work with other historians as well as specialists who work primarily outside of the humanities. Who were the partners on this project and how did you all develop productive approaches to dialogue and workflow across disciplines?
Digital humanities is by definition collaborative because it is rare for a single scholar to be able to master all of the necessary skills. In my case, I had graduate research assistants – Selene García Jiménez (El Colegio de México); Jon Coulis, Angie Picone, and Alex Cors (Emory University) – photographing, transcribing, and culling data from letters of attorney. At ECDS, Joanna Mundy, Sara Palmer, and Jennifer Doty contributed to the design of the project data base, and Sara oversaw the production of the Gephi network graphs. Megan Slemens, ECDS GIS librarian, and Michael Page, ECDS Geographer spatialized the Gephi network graphs in Google Earth, and developed CARTO maps. Phil MacLeod, Latin American Studies Librarian at Woodruff Library helped me to locate historical maps and geographical data. Julius Kniffki, a freelance photographer contributed photos for the website (as did I), and Erin Hecht, a freelance web-designer developed the streamlined and user-friendly and artful layout for the website. I designed the categories of analysis, interpreted the maps and visualizations, and wrote the text for the site.
Coordinating workflow could at times be a challenge, especially at the outset when my graduate assistants and I seemed to be speaking a different language from our ECDS colleagues. The historical context of eighteenth century Oaxaca – from the names of native communities, to the geographic layout of administrative units, to notarial language – required translation and explanation. So too did the language of relational databases, network graphs, and google earth coordinates, especially since all of it was novel to me. After about 18 months of work, we found our groove, and came to understand what each part of the team needed and where to find it. It was really rewarding to develop these collaborative relationships over time and see the project unfold.
How do the maps and visualizations on the site reshape our understanding of indigenous legal culture?
It has been hard to shake the misconception that native communal life in colonial Mexico was parochial; that, as the saying goes, it extended no further than what could be seen from the church bell tower. It is true that many conflicts and concerns were locally rooted and oriented around communal structures. But as the maps and visualizations of Power of Attorney demonstrate, native people were well aware of the spatial organization of colonial bureaucracy and the court system, and they contracted legal representation in order to maximize their advantage within the patchwork of legal jurisdictions that made up the Spanish Empire. Scholarship on native litigation has blossomed in the last decade, so the argument about native legal strategizing is not new. But seeing how relationships born of litigation played out in space and over time, and how they connected native communities to one another and to distant courts provides a much richer understanding of the material and cultural ties that bound the empire. Crucially, the trajectory of these relationships, initiated by native litigants, moves from the indigenous region outward, rather than the other way around.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda?
I am currently writing a book about native justice and jurisdiction in Oaxaca from the eighteenth century through the first three decades after Mexico’s independence from Spain. “Power of Attorney” has helped me to understand in much greater depth the relationship between native and Spanish jurisdictions. It has also helped me to train my eye on contracts (letters of attorney were a form of contract) as a key source for understanding changes in customary law and legal and institutional relationships at a variety of scales. Early on, I imagined that this project would be part of the book, but then decided to keep the two projects separate. As the book has developed, though, I am beginning to see more connections, and am re-thinking how they might come together.
Tehila Sasson Contributes to ‘Past & Present’ Roundtable
Assistant Professor of History Tehila Sasson recently contributed to a roundtable for the journal Past & Present on the expanding field of research about the history of humanitarianism. Sasson, a specialist in Britain in the World, is currently completing her first monograph, provisionally titled We Are the World: Humanitarian Ethics, Global Markets and the End of Empire. Read an excerpt from her contribution to the roundtable below along with the full discussion here: “History and Humanitarianism: A Conversation.”
“I came as a sceptic to this field. In the political landscape where I grew up in Israel, human rights and humanitarianism have often been used as empty rhetoric to justify forms of intervention and governance rather than to offer any real political alternative to minorities and refugees. My first encounter with the works of Hannah Arendt, Didier Fassin and Jacques Rancière during my undergraduate studies in 2003 was formative to the way I came to perceive the field politically as well as intellectually. Human rights and humanitarianism, I learned from them, offered a thin political framework, indeed too thin, that was stripped of any robust notion of obligation, responsibility and rights. A class I took with Wendy Brown and Saba Mahmood later in graduate school taught me that not only rights discourse but also moral technologies carry with them an entire array of contradictions connected to empire, religion and the economy.”
“How Reconsidering Atticus Finch Makes us Reconsider America”: Joe Crespino in ‘Pacific Standard’
History Department Chair and Jimmy Carter Professor of History Joseph Crespino discussed his most recent book, Atticus Finch: The Biography (Basic Books, 2018), with Brandon Tensley of Pacific Standard. In “How Reconsidering Atticus Finch Makes us Reconsider America,” Crespino talks about the enduring relevance of this fictional character in American society and politics. Read an excerpt below along with the full article here.
“Lee wrote her two novels in the midst of the massive resistance era. These were the days of Southern politics when you saw the rise of a right-wing, militant segregationist movement, when you had politicians who only a few years earlier had been dismissed as cranks, as nobodies, as jokes being elected to office—look at Ross Barnett in Mississippi or Lester Maddox in Georgia. That’s the period Lee was writing in. And she was trying to make sense of the fact that what she admired as the principled conservatism of her father was being overrun by—but also, crucially, was not standing up to—right-wing reactionaries across many states in the South.”
Jeffrey Lesser Surveys Rising Evangelical Influence in Brazilian Society and Politics
Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning, discussed the increasing influence of evangelicals in Brazilian society and politics for Bloomberg. The article was released three days before the first round of Brazil’s 2018 elections. The October 7 elections included the near-victory of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate with substantial evangelical support. Read the full piece, written by R.T. Watson, David Biller, and Samy Adghirni, here: “From Jails to Congress, Brazil’s Evangelicals Could Swing Election.”
Anderson’s ‘One Person, No Vote’ Named to National Book Award Longlist
Dr. Carol Anderson’s newly-released book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, was named to the National Book Award longlist. Published by Bloomsbury and released on September 11, 2018, One Person, No Vote charts continuities in practices of voter suppression from the nineteenth century through the present. Read more about Anderson’s work and Emory’s representation on the National Book Award longlist in the Emory News Center’s article “Emory professors named to 2018 National Book Awards longlists.”
Carol Anderson Publishes ‘One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy’
Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies, has just published a new book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury Publishing 2018). Anderson is Associated Faculty in the Department of History. The Emory News Center profiled Anderson’s new work in a video and article by Kimber Williams: “New book explores history of voter suppression in America.” Anderson is also the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, which received the 2016 National Book Critics Award in Criticism.
Dr. Jason Ward Publishes Piece in ‘Southern Spaces’
Congratulations to Jason Ward, acting professor of History, who recently authored a piece for Southern Spaces. The article reviews Melanie S. Morrison’s Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Read Ward’s article here: “Shades of Violence: Jim Crow Justice and Black-Resistance in the Depression-Era South.”
Ruby Lal’s ‘Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan’ Published by W.W. Norton
Professor of South Asian Studies Ruby Lal recently published Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan with W.W. Norton. Lal is Associated Faculty in the History Department. The biography charts the ascendance of the empress in 17th Century India and her unprecedented rule over the vast Mughal empire. Read a more detailed description of the book below along with Lal’s recent article about it on the BBC, “The Mughal queen who became a feminist icon.”
Four centuries ago, a Muslim woman ruled an empire.
When it came to hunting, she was a master shot. As a dress designer, few could compare. An ingenious architect, she innovated the use of marble in her parents’ mausoleum on the banks of the Yamuna River that inspired her stepson’s Taj Mahal. And she was both celebrated and reviled for her political acumen and diplomatic skill, which rivaled those of her female counterparts in Europe and beyond.
In 1611, thirty-four-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and most cherished wife of the Emperor Jahangir. While other wives were secluded behind walls, Nur ruled the vast Mughal Empire alongside her husband, and governed in his stead as his health failed and his attentions wandered from matters of state. An astute politician and devoted partner, Nur led troops into battle to free Jahangir when he was imprisoned by one of his own officers. She signed and issued imperial orders, and coins of the realm bore her name.
Acclaimed historian Ruby Lal uncovers the rich life and world of Nur Jahan, rescuing this dazzling figure from patriarchal and Orientalist clichés of romance and intrigue, and giving new insight into the lives of women and girls in the Mughal Empire, even where scholars claim there are no sources. Nur’s confident assertion of authority and talent is revelatory. In Empress, she finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.