Category / Research

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Welcoming New Graduate Students

The Emory History Department is excited to welcome five new doctoral students to the department in the fall 2025 semester, along with one graduate exchange student from the University of Augsburg, Germany. Read abridged profiles of the new graduate cohort below and follow the links to read their full biographies on the History Department website.

Savanna Courtney-Durrett received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of North Florida. Her research examines African American women’s entrepreneurship and activism in the funeral business during the early twentieth century. Her graduate work will be advised by Drs. Crystal Sanders, Jason Morgan Ward, and Kali Gross

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Maren Fauth is an exchange student from the University of Augsburg, Germany. She received her B.A. in English and American Studies with a minor in Philosophy in 2024 and is currently pursuing a M.A. in North American Studies. Her research interests include women’s history, African American history, and the history of social protest movements. Fauth’s work will be advised by Drs. Astrid M. Eckert and Laura Nenzi.

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Ziying Lin received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Lin studies social history, environmental history, and gender studies, with a particular research interest in the material culture of dowries in Edo Japan. Drs. Laura Nenzi and Julia Bullock will advise her work.

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Mary Elizabeth Marquardt received her A.B. from Princeton University in history and African American studies and her M.A.R. from Yale University. She studies religion, race, and legal history in the U.S. South, with a focus on 20th century interactions between churches and the state. Drs. Joseph Crespino, Mary Dudziak, and Alison Collis Greene will advise Marquardt’s work.

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Yerbol Munai earned a bachelor’s degree in Kazakh Language and Literature and a master’s degree in Turkology from Minzu University of China. He specializes in the modern history of Central Asia, with a focus on the Kazakh and other Central Asian Turkic communities in the early 20th century. Drs. Matthew J. Payne and Hwisang Cho will advise Munai’s work.

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Jayden Trawick-Junta is a native of Portland, OR, and earned his B.A. from Berea College in History and African & African American Studies. He studies race, culture, and sports in the U.S. during the twentieth century, focusing on how Negro League baseball teams interacted with Black communities in their cities. Drs. Carl Suddler and Jason Morgan Ward will advise his work.

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Crystal R. Sanders Discusses ‘A Forgotten Migration’ on Black Perspectives


Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and associated faculty in the History Department, was recently interviewed in the publication Black Perspectives. Sanders discusses her most recent book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024), with Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought. A Forgotten Migration has won multiple awards since its release, including the 2025 Pauli Murray Book Prize. Read an excerpt from the interview below and find the full conversation here.

“During the age of Jim Crow, especially, many white people saw educated African Americans as a threat to the racial status quo so there was no enthusiasm or adequate financial appropriation to assist African Americans in pursuing postbaccalaureate degrees. That is why segregation scholarship programs were never funded sufficiently and demand always exceeded supply.“

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Graduate Student Emilie Cunning Receives LBJ Library Moody Research Grant


History graduate student Emilie Cunning has received a Moody Research Grant from the LBJ Presidential Library. She will head to Austin this fall to conduct archival research on transnational protest cultures in the US and UK in the 1960s-1970s. Her dissertation project is tentatively titled “Transnational Protest Cultures: The Anti-War and Black Power Movements in Britain and the United States, 1960-1974.”

Cunning has developed her dissertation project through varied activities over the last year. In the spring semester, she taught a course related to her research titled “US & the Cold War.” In March, she presented her work at the Boston University American Political History Graduate Conference. The paper focused on transnational anti-war networks during the Vietnam era, specifically on the role of “American Exiles” in Britain who formed a persistent source of opposition to the American war in Vietnam while working with British anti-war groups such as the BCPV and CND.

Earlier this summer, Cunning attended BOCA LONGA at University College London. BOCA LONGA is an annual spring workshop that brings together U.S. historians (both faculty and graduate students) from Boston University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, University College London, and Emory. She attended along with History Department graduate student Jessica Locklear, Emory College Senior Associate Dean Joseph Crespino, and Profs. Jason Ward, Daniel LaChance and Carl Suddler.


Cunning will defend her dissertation prospectus this August.

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Doctoral Candidate Olivia Cocking Wins Dissertation Fellowships


Doctoral candidate Olivia Cocking has won two fellowships to support her dissertation, titled “France After Empire: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Rights, 1946 – Present.” The European Union Studies Association awarded Cocking its Ernst Haas Dissertation Fellowship, and Emory’s Laney Graduate School awarded her the Emory University Women’s Club Memorial Fellowship. Cocking is completing research and dissertation write up in Paris. She has presented papers at the Society for the Study of French History conference in Manchester, UK, and the Groupe de recherche sur les orders coloniaux colloquium, in Nantes, France.

Cocking has also received honorable mention for the Edward T. Gargan Prize from the Western Society for French History for her paper “‘Je ne comprends pas pourquoi j’ai perdu tous mes droits’: Migration and Welfare in France After Empire.” She presented the paper at the society’s conference in San Francisco in November 2024.

Profs. Tehila Sasson, Judith Miller (co-directors), and Mariana Candido serve on her dissertation committee. 

by emoryhistorydept

History Department Well Represented in Fox Center’s 2025-26 Fellows Cohort


History Department faculty and students are well represented in the recently-announced 2025-26 cohort of fellows at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Faculty and graduate fellows will conduct research intersecting with this year’s theme, Life/Story, which draws “inspiration from the many ways humanities fields and disciplines often approach a single life as the entry point for examining broad political, socio-cultural, and historical phenomena.”

Four undergraduate History students will hold Undergraduate Humanities Honors fellowships. These Fellowships support undergraduates as they complete their honors theses, introduce them to the life of the Humanities, and provide a venue for interdisciplinary interchange, mentorship, and conference-style presentation.

View short profiles of the faculty and student fellows below and follow the links to more extended biographies.

Hwisang Cho (Associated Faculty in History) specializes in the cultural, intellectual, and literary history of Korea, comparative textual media, and global written culture. His major work-in-progress is  “Irresistible Fabulation: Moral Imagination and Storytelling in Korean Confucian Tradition.”

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Alejandro Guardado is a 6th year PhD Candidate in the Department of History. His dissertation, “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn (1968-2000),” examines how Indigenous activists developed political networks to bolster self-determination movements in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

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Leo Raykher is a senior majoring in History. His thesis, titled “Economics, Espionage, and Exile: the Surveilled life of David Drucker, esq.,” examines the life of his great, great uncle David Drucker.

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Thora Jordt is a History and Art History major from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her project examines the artist Alexandra Exter’s contributions as a costume and set designer for theatre and film between 1915 and 1925, with a focus on the 1924 film Aelita: Queen of Mars.

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Daniel Bell is a rising senior from Chicago, Illinois, double-majoring in Economics and History. His thesis project is centered around Herbert Jenkins, Atlanta’s influential twentieth-century police chief.

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Eunjae Thompson is a senior studying Philosophy and Religion with a minor in History. Their honors thesis, titled “Beyond Capture: Blackened Piety & the Politics of Refusal,” will interrogate how the life-writing genre not only illuminates but draws the boundaries of the human condition.

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Ursula Rall Awarded Fellowship at the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania


Doctoral student Ursula Rall has won a fellowship for at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is working on her dissertation, entitled “Forging Inter-Urban Communities: Spatial Mobilities and Social Networks of Women of African Descent in New Spain, 1580-1740.” Drawing on research in Spain and Mexico, the project explores how the social networks that Black women formed across urban centers were key to the socioeconomic mobility of the Black Mexican population during the seventeenth century. She argues that Afro-descended women had a sense of a shared racialized and gendered community, forming close ties and financial networks that improved their social and material lives.

Rall’s research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Grant, the American Historical Association, the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, the Conference on Latin American History, and Emory University’s Halle Institute for Global Research. Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Professor and Department Chair, is Rall’s faculty advisor.

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Chira Named Winship Distinguished Professor of History

Adriana Chira


Dr. Adriana Chira, Associate Professor of Atlantic World History, has been named Winship Distinguished Professor of History (effective September 1, 2025). Chira’s research and teaching specializations include: Atlantic history; Cuba in world history; race; slavery and the law; land tenure and property; and post-emancipation. This prestigious appointment recognizes Chira’s scholarly eminence and contributions to Emory’s mission.

Chira’s first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantation (Cambridge University Press, Afro-Latin America Series, 2022), focuses on enslaved and free Afro-descendants’ efforts to own landed property and to attain free legal status through claims to ownership filed inside first instance and appellate courts in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The book traces the political implications of these processes, arguing for a history of emancipation that pays attention to vernacular legalism and modes of claiming property. The project is based on extensive archival research within Cuba (in Havana and Santiago de Cuba) and Spain.


Patchwork Freedoms received the Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic World History from the American Historical Association, the Peter Gonville Stein Prize for best book in non-US legal history from the American Society for Legal History, and the Elsa Goveia Prize for excellence in Caribbean history from the Association of Caribbean Historians. It has also received honorable mentions from the Latin American Studies Association (the Nineteenth Century Section) and from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Section of the Southern Historical Association.

Chira has also authored multiple acclaimed scholarly articles, including:

  • “Freedom with Local Bonds: Custom and Manumission in the Age of Emancipation,” The American Historical Review 126.3 (September), 949-977
  • “Ampliando los significados de sevicia: Los reclamos de protección corporal de los esclavos en la Cuba del siglo XIX,” Páginas: Revista Digital de la Escuela de Historia de la Universidad de Rosario (Argentina) no. 33 (Sept./Oct.): https://revistapaginas.unr.edu.ar/index.php/RevPaginas/article/view/546
  • “Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817-1868,” Law and History Review 36.1 (winter), 1-33.

Chira teaches a range of thematic and placed-based courses, from “Human Trafficking in World History” to “History Lab: Puerto Rico.” She also created an Emory study abroad program in Cuba, which focuses on questions of food sovereignty and environmental history, that usually takes place during the Maymester semester.

Students and faculty on Cuba study abroad trip, 2024


Chira’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by residential fellowships at Yale University (at the Agrarian Studies Center) and at Harvard University (with the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History).

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Yannakakis Named Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History


Dr. Yanna Yannakakis has been named Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History in recognition of her excellent scholarship, outstanding teaching, and deep service to Emory. Yannakakis is a social and cultural historian of colonial Latin America with specializations in the history of Mexico, ethnohistory, the history of legal systems, and the interaction of indigenous peoples and institutions in Mexico. The new position is effective September 1, 2025.

Her most recent book, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom & Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press, 2023) was awarded the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History and the Friedrich Katz Prize in Latin American and Caribbean History, one of the top awards from the American Historical Association. Since Time Immemorial traces the invention, translation, and deployment of the legal category of Native custom, with particular attention to how Indigenous litigants and colonial authorities refashioned social and cultural norms related to marriage, crime, religion, land, labor, and self-governance in Native communities. The monograph was published open access with support from Emory’s TOME initiative.


Yannakakis’ first book, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2008), examined how native cultural brokers negotiated with Spanish courts and the Catholic Church to open and maintain a space for the political and cultural autonomy of indigenous elites and their communities during Mexico’s colonial period. The book won the 2009 Howard Francis Cline Memorial Award from the Conference on Latin American History for the best book on the history of Latin America’s Indigenous peoples.

Yannakakis has co-edited or co-authored multiple other books and articles, including Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Colonial Mexico and the Andes (Duke University Press, 2014) (with Gabriela Ramos), Los indios ante la justicia local: intérpretes, oficiales, y litigantes en Nueva España y Guatemala siglos XVI-XVIII (Colegio de Michoacán, 2019) (with Luis Alberto Arrioja Díaz Viruell and Martina Schrader-Kniffki), “A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” American Historical Review (February 2019) (with Bianca Premo), and the special issue “Law, Politics, and Indigeneity in the Making of Ethnohistory: Perspectives from Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific,” Ethnohistory (70:2, 2023) (with Miranda Johnson).


Yannakakis is also the coordinator on an ongoing, open access digital humanities project, titled “Power of Attorney: Native People, Legal Culture, & Social Networks in Mexico.” Read more about this project: “Recent Faculty Publications: Q & A with Yanna Yannakakis about ‘Power of Attorney.’”

by emoryhistorydept

Lesser Publishes ‘Living and Dying in São Paulo’ with Duke UP


Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, has published a new monograph, Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil, with Duke University Press. The work examines competing visions of wellbeing in Brazil among racialized immigrants, policymakers, and health officials over 150 years and primarily in São Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood, drawing out the connected systems of the built environment, public health laws and practices, and citizenship. In addition to historical and literary documentation, Lesser’s book was informed by a multi-year observation of a basic health team at the Octávio Augusto Rodovalho Public Health Clinic of the Brazilian National Health Service. Read praise for Living and Dying below and find the full open access book from Duke UP.

“Living and Dying in São Paulo is methodologically innovative, conceptually powerful, and engagingly written. Jeffrey Lesser’s book has rare precision and creativity. Not only does he give an insightful reading of place and people, he also makes a bold case for historians to adopt new approaches and for those in the social and biomedical sciences to pose questions historically. This is the kind of writing I am sure most historians—myself included—wish they could do.” – Jerry Dávila, Jorge Paulo Lemann Chair in Brazilian History, the University of Illinois.

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Alex Minovici (C ’25) Receives Inaugural Fox Center Undergraduate Honors Award

Recent Emory graduate and history major Alex Minovici has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry’s Undergraduate Honors Award for the thesis, “Singe Spaima: The 1989 Revolution and the Politics of Violence in Socialist and Post Socialist Romania.” Minovici, who completed a double major in Philosophy, Politics, and Law, produced the thesis as an Undergraduate Honors Fellow at the Fox Center over the 2025-26 academic year. “Singe Spaima” received Highest Honors from the Emory Department of History.

Minovici offered reflections on the thesis and experience as a fellow at the Fox Center in conversation with Karl-Mary Akre (Fox Center Communications and Outreach Coordinator). Read an excerpt below along with their full conversation.

“…what truly gives Romanian people power in their new democracy is remembering the violence and trauma with the express purpose of holding state officials accountable; refusing to forget abuses. Memory can be an act of resistance. Along these lines, I feel as if my thesis is part of a broader effort to document, remember, and respect the trauma that Romanians experienced in recent history.”