Dawn Peterson, Assistant Professor of History, published an illustrated excerpt of the introduction to her newest book in Southern Spaces. The book is titled Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion and published by Harvard University Press this year. As explained on the Southern Spaces page, the book “looks at a group of white slaveholders who adopted Southeast Indian boys (Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw) into their plantation households in the decades following the US Revolution. While these adoptions might seem novel at first glance, they in fact reveal how the plantation household—and the racialized kinship structures that underpin it—increasingly came to shape human life for American Indians, African Americans, and Euro-Americans after the emergence of the United States.” Check out the piece on Southern Spaces, which includes a fascinating series of images that range from a Catawba deerskin map (1724) to a photo of Pupils at Carlisle Indian Industrial School (circa 1900).
Category / Research
Claudia Kreklau (PhD Candidate) Wins Essay Prize from German Studies Association
Claudia Kreklau and her faculty advisor Dr. Brian Vick.
Big news! Congratulations to Claudia Kreklau for winning the 2017 Graduate Student Essay Prize of the German Studies Association for her paper “Travel, Technology, and Theory: The Aesthetics of Ichthyology during the Second Scientific Revolution.” The prize jury thought that the essay “stood out for its clear organization, its accessible, lucid writing, and its deep level of research.” As part of the Prize, the essay will be published in the German Studies Review. As the laudatio indicates, “whether one comes from the angle of the historian, or literary scholar, or naturalist, this essay offers innovative and persuasive perspectives on the intersection of the natural world with technology and human intervention.” Congratulations, Claudia, on this major achievement!
Roxani Margariti, MESAS Associate Professor and Associated Faculty in the History Department, Wins Greek Diaspora Fellowship
Congratulations to Roxani Margariti, Associate Professor in Middle Eastern Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, for winning a Greek Diaspora Fellowship. Margariti will teach a graduate seminar at the University of Crete, titled “From Muhammad to the Mamluks: Medieval Middle Eastern and Islamic History and Historiography.” Read the Emory News Center’s story about Margariti’s course, and learn more about the Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program.
Dr. Ernest Freeberg (Ph.D., 1995) to Present at National Archives at Atlanta
Ph.D. alumnus Ernest Freeberg (1995) will return to Atlanta on September 16 to present at a symposium, The Great War Over Here: Stories from the Home Front, held at the National Archives at Atlanta. Freeberg is Department Head and Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the author of Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Harvard UP, 2010). View more details about the event here.
Dr. Kristin Mann Wins Distinguished Scholar Award
Congratulations to Dr. Kristin Mann, Professor of History, for winning the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Lagos Studies Association. Mann’s book publications about Lagos include Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge UP, 1985) and Slavery and the Birth of an African History: Lagos, 1760-1900 (Indiana UP, 2007). Read a more complete description of Mann’s scholarship and service to the discipline, written by Dr. Jessica Reuther (Ph.D., 2016), here.
LaChance to Speak at AJC Decatur Book Festival
Dr. Daniel LaChance, Assistant Professor of History, will speak at the AJC Decatur Book Festival on Sunday, September 3. A specialist in the history of capital punishment, LaChance’s talk is entitled “Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States.” Read more about the talk here.
Dr. Tehila Sasson Wins Bernath Scholarly Article Prize
Congratulations to Dr. Tehila Sasson, Assisant Professor of History, for winning the Bernath Scholarly Article Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Sasson won the prize for her article, “Milking the Third World: Humanitarianism, Capitalism, and the Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott,” published in the October 2016 edition of the American Historical Review.
Daniel LaChance on GPB: ‘How Americans Change Their Tune On The Death Penalty’
Assistant Professor of History Daniel LaChance recently appeared on Georgia Public Broadcasting’s show On Second Thought to discuss changing perceptions among the U.S. populace about capital punishment. LaChance published his first book, Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States, last year with the University of Chicago Press. Listen to the full interview here.
Edward Hatfield (PhD, ’15) Named Managing Editor of ‘New Georgia Encyclopedia’
Congratulations to Dr. Edward Hatfield, alumnus of the graduate program in American history, for being named managing editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia. The publication, first launched in 2004, was the first state encyclopedia designed for the web. The project is run by the Georgia Humanities Council. Hatfield was an advisee of Dr. Joseph Crespino.
Ben Nobbs-Thiessen (PhD 2016) Wins Dissertation Award
Congratulations to Dr. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen for winning the 2016 Gilbert C. Fite Award for the best dissertation on agricultural history from the Agricultural History Society. He completed his dissertation, “The Cultivated State, Migrants and the Transformation of the Bolivian Lowlands, 1952-2000,” in 2016 under the advisement of Drs. Jeffrey Lesser, Peter Little, Thomas D. Rogers, and Yanna Yannakakis. Read the below for a more detailed explanation of Nobbs-Thiessen’s research:
My research explores the role of migrants in the “March to the East” a large-scale settlement and rural development initiative undertaken by the Bolivian state after 1952. Over half a century hundreds of thousands of settlers arrived in the tropical Department of Santa Cruz in Bolivia’s Eastern Lowlands to begin new lives as frontier farmers. Among the migrants were indigenous Bolivians from the nation’s highlands, low-German speaking Mennonites from Canada, Paraguay and Mexico as well as groups of Japanese and Okinawan colonists that had been re-settled with support from the Japanese government and the U.S. military. Together these diverse streams made the March to the East a uniquely transnational affair and a compelling case study for understanding migration and mid-century rural modernization.