Category / Research

by abritt

Emory Launches First Annual Brazil Week, September 19-23

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On September 19, 2016, Emory will inaugurate the first annual Brazil Week, a celebration of the university’s engagement with Brazil. The multidisciplinary series of activities, organized by Emory’s Brazil Initiative through the Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning, will involve History faculty and students from Emory and elsewhere. History Department faculty within the Brazil Initiative include Dr. Jeffrey Lesser (Chair and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History) and Dr. Thomas D. Rogers (Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History). Check out a schedule of events below, read more about the Brazil initiative, and visit this page to register for the week’s events.

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Placing Time: The Power of Mapping Technology for Historical Analysis
Tuesday, September 20
4:00-5:00pm
Oxford Road Building Auditorium

Emory professor Michael Page will present Atlanta Explorer, a project dedicated to building and disseminating geographical datasets and tools for exploring Atlanta’s history. Professor Luís Ferla of Federal University of São Paulo will describe the work of Hímaco: History, Maps, Computers, a collaborative laboratory of historians, geographers, and computer scientists exploring the spatial history of São Paulo. This panel, moderated by Professor Michael Elliott, Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences, features the current work of these partners in a new collaboration on Brazilian urban studies.

Zika: A Brazilian Perspective on A Global Challenge
Wednesday, September 21
4:00-5:30pm, followed by a casual reception
Atwood Hall 360
(New Chemistry Building)

Zika virus’ arrival in Brazil and the rest of the world unleashed a storm of public health challenges and media attention. Brazil has been at the forefront of the epidemic and the efforts to address it, and transmission is now ongoing in many areas in the Americas, including Florida and Puerto Rico in the U.S. Dr. Mariana Kikuti, DVM, PhD Candidate, Federal University of Bahia; Dr. Uriel Kitron, Goodrich C. White Professor of Environmental Sciences, Emory University; Dr. Igor Paploski, DVM, PhD Candidate, Federal University of Bahia; and Dr. Lincoln Suesdek, Researcher at Scientific Council of Butantan Institute, Brazil, will provide a brief overview of Zika and its mosquito vector – Aedes aegypti, present findings from their studies in the Brazilian cities of São Paulo and Salvador, and answer questions from the audience.

Bate-Papo: Portuguese Conversational Hour
Friday, September 23
1:00-2:30pm
Great Room, Longstreet-Means Hall

Come join us for pizza and conversations in Portuguese with students, faculty, and staff from across the university and broader community.

Additional cultural events will be organized throughout the week by the Brazilian Student Association (BRASA), including Capoeira Performance/Workshop on Monday, September 19 at 7:30 pm in the Woodruff P.E. Center and a Samba performance. Visit here for updates and details.

 

by abritt

Incoming PhD Student Virgo Morrison Featured by Emory News Center

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This fall the Emory History Department welcomes a stellar new cohort of ten first-year graduate students. One of those students, Virgo Morrison, was recently profiled by the Emory News Center. An advisee of Joseph Crespino, Morrison’s research focuses on the impacts of drug abuse and drug policy in the South. Copied below is Morrison’s profile. Check out a few of the other incoming students to the Laney Graduate School here.

Virgo Morrison

Hometown: Woodstock, Georgia

Emory degree program: PhD in history

Completed degrees: BA in history, MA in history, Virginia State University

Focus of scholarship: Traditionally, drug abuse has been perceived as primarily a Northern metropolitan phenomenon and much of narcotics history has been similarly one-dimensional. Through my research I intend to broaden the field by exploring the impact drug abuse and drug policy had across the rural-urban spectrum in the 20th century American South. I am specifically interested in how regional manifestations of segregation, conservativism, and drug rehabilitation influenced the formation of drug policy and popular sentiments about drug abuse.

Why it matters: If the current opioid epidemic has shown us anything, it is that we still do not understand how to craft effective drug policies. It is perhaps too ambitious to hope there is an answer to this problem within our history but I do believe that an accurate account of our past successes and failures could provide us with, at the very least, a solid foundation.

Proudest academic achievement to date: While completing my master’s degree I picked up a day job as a masonry restoration specialist for a historic preservation company. My days were spent tuckpointing marble balustrades or laying brick six stories high whereas my nights were spent formatting footnotes and reading for classes. Looking back now I view this experience as an accomplishment rather than an obstacle. I never missed a class, I graduated, and I even became a decent bricklayer to boot.

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Professor Tonio Andrade Wins Article Prize from the Society for Medieval Military History

Dr. Tonio Andrade was awarded the Gillingham Prize for his article “Late Medieval Divergences:  Comparative Perspectives on Early Gunpowder Warfare in Europe and China.” Andrade’s article appeared in the Journal of Medieval Military History in 2014. The Gillingham Prize is given annually by the Society for Medieval Military History to the best article by a member to appear in the preceding issue of the Journal of Medieval Military History.

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Professor Tonio Andrade Weighs in on Tensions in South China Sea in `The Washington Post`

Professor Tonio Andrade recently authored an opinion piece for The Washington Post examining brewing tensions in the South China Sea. Andrade, who published The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History with Princeton this year, urges U.S. policy makers to reckon with the histories of Chinese expansionism in the Eastern Hemisphere despite past and present claims otherwise. Check out the excerpt below and read the full article, “For U.S. leaders, confronting China is a dangerous game,” here.

What’s intriguing is that the timing of these bouts of expansive warfare was similar: They each occurred about 40 or 50 years after the dynasty was founded, after domestic control had been consolidated. And why did the Ming and Qing dynasties engage in such expansion after achieving domestic consolidation? In a word, security. In each case, leaders justified their military action with reference to China’s historic vulnerability. Only by achieving unquestioned preeminence in its hemisphere — or, as Chinese leaders put it, in the earthly realm — could China guarantee safety and security for its people. Expansion was meant to foster peace.

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Claudia Kreklau, History PhD student, is featured in a German Newspaper (HAZ) for her research

The German newspaper Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung (HAZ) reported on third year PhD student Claudia Kreklau’s work on nineteenth-century food. The regional paper featured Claudia’s research at the World of Kitchen (WOK) Museum in Hannover.

The archive welcomed the Emory student to gather data among their 7000-volume collection of cookbooks and ephemera, including various copies of the Practical Cookbook by nineteenth-century best-selling author Henriette Davidis, a vegetarian guide from the fin-de-siècle, and advertisements connected to the industrialization of foodstuffs. The wider collection houses objects of material culture which, along with Claudia’s findings of handwritten recipes, household diaries, and correspondence in the WOK’s manuscript collection, will contribute to her research on the development of German cooking traditions and questions of identity in the nineteenth century.

Claudia Kreklau is advised by Dr. Brian Vick.

The print version circulated July 7, 2016. E-version published July 10, 2016.

Read the original article here.

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Carol Anderson’s “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide” Reviewed in “The New York Times”

Carol Anderson‘s The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2014) was recently reviewed by Jesse McCarthy in The New York Times. McCarthy’s review, titled “Why Are Whites So Angry,” appraised Anderson’s work as an “extraordinarily timely and urgent call to confront the legacy of structural racism bequeathed by white anger and resentment, and to show its continuing threat to the promise of American democracy.” Professor Anderson is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies. Read the full review here.

Media of White Rage

 

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Collaboration between Professor Mark Ravina and History Major TJ Greer Featured on ‘Digital Humanities Now’

Over the last year Dr. Mark Ravina and history major TJ Greer have collaborated on a digital humanities project examining the rhetoric of student activism and university administration responses through text mining. The project was recently profiled by the editors of the website Digital Humanities Now, where the study’s findings will appear in a series of blog posts. Read an excerpt from their first post below (“Mining the Movement: Some DH perspectives on student activism”) and check out the full run here.

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This first blog reflects our first preliminary results, but even at this early stage we feel comfortable with two declarations: one empirical and one political. The empirical observation is that university administrations are largely talking past students, employing a radically different vocabulary than that of student demands. Our political observation is that universities need to address student demands seriously and directly, even if that means admitting that some problems are deeply structural and that solutions will require decades rather than months or years.

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Dr. Brian Vick’s New Book Selected for Roundtable Review on H-Diplo

Professor Brian Vick, Associate Professor of History, published The Congress of Vienna, Power and Politics after Napoleon with Harvard University Press in 2014. The internet network H-Diplo recently selected Vick’s monograph for a multi-review roundtable and a response from the author. One of the reviewers, Jonathan Sperber (University of Missouri), praises Vick’s extensive use of primary sources and original approach. Sperber asserts that The Congress of Vienna for offers “a striking reinterpretation of the Congress, the practice of diplomacy and the political culture of post-Napoleonic Europe, which substantially enhances our understanding of the era while opening new possibilities for historical investigation and provoking scholarly debate.” Read the full set of reviews and Vick’s response here.

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Roark Prize, Endowed by Young Alumni, Established to Support Undergraduate Research

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Retiring Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History, Dr. Jim Roark, will be honored with a scholarship for undergraduate research bearing his name. The Roark Prize will support rising seniors in the History Department pursuing research in the United States relating to their honors thesis. The idea for the prize originated with two former history students, Ben Leiner (’14) and Naveed Amalfard (’14), who counted Roark as an inspiring mentor and professor. Read the Emory News Center’s full report on the prize here.

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First-Year Graduate Students End Semester with Hi-Five Research Presentations

The first-year cohort from the PhD program recently capped off the semester by presenting their research at the department’s annual Hi-Five event. The Hi-Five helps students develop their academic, presentation, and research communication skills and is based on the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition that originated at The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. The format is also used by the Laney Graduate School for those students completing their Ph.D. dissertations. In presentations to the department, each student must adhere to the following rules:

  • Presentations must be five minutes or less. Presentations will be cut off after five minutes.
  • A single static PowerPoint slide is permitted (no slide transitions, animations or ‘movement’ in the slide, and the slide is to be presented from the beginning of the oration).
  • No additional electronic media (e.g. sound and video files) are permitted.
  • No additional props (e.g. costumes, musical instruments, laboratory equipment) are permitted.
  • Presentations are to be spoken word (e.g. no poems, raps or songs).
  • Presentations are to commence from the front of the room and must be done while standing.
  • Presentations are considered to have commenced when a presenter starts their presentation through movement or speech.

Participating students and the titles of their papers are as follows:

Oskar Czendze – “Old Homes Made New: The Reinvention of Landsmanshaftn in the United States”

Mary Grace Dupree – “The Golden Chalice: Vision and Prophecy in the Narrative of Perpetua of Carthage”

Cheng-Heng Lu – “Double-edged Sword: The History of the Shi Clan in the Qing Empire”

Luke Hagemann – “Imperial Clementia in Late Roman Law”

Anthony Tipping – “A Coercive Public Health Campaign in Rio de Janeiro: The benevolent elite, the ignorant masses, and the revolta da vacina of 1904″

Alexandra Lemos Zagonel – “Secret Agent Men: Spying at Brazilian Universities in the Twilight of Military Rule”

Tim Romans – “Under the Vermillion Seal: Japan’s Forgotten Tokugawa Pirates”

Anthony Sciubba – “Ancient Arbitration: Conflict Mediation in Late Antiquity”