Dr. J. E. Morgan, a 2021 graduate of the doctoral program, was recently named an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute in Williamsburg, VA. As an OI-NEH fellow, Morgan will continue work on her manuscript “American Concubines: Gender, Race, Law, and Power in the British Caribbean and North American South, 1661-1800.” She has previously held visiting faculty positions at the University of Florida and Emory University. Morgan’s dissertation, “American Concubines: Gender, Race, Law, and Power in the British Caribbean and North American South, 1661-1800,” was advised by Drs. Leslie Harris and Yanna Yannakakis.
Jeffrey Lesser with Ambassador Marion V. Creekmore, namesake of the Marion V. Creekmore Award for Internationalization.
Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research, was recently recognized with the Creekmore Award for Internationalization by Emory’s Office of Global Strategies and Initiatives. The Creekmore Award is given annually to a faculty member who has made extraordinary contributions to Emory’s global work and reputation. As director of the Halle Institute, Lesser has created innovative programs that support faculty and student research, bridging disciplines and connecting Emory with scholars around the world. Lesser is a leading scholar of Brazilian history, particularly constructions of national identity. His current research investigates the intersections of immigration and public health in the city of São Paulo. Read more about the 2023 International Award winners here: “2023 International Awards honor history professor, international student programs director and entertainment industry CEO.”
Dr. Hannah Rose Abrahamson, a 2022 doctoral program graduate, recently won the Maureen Ahern Award from the Latin American Studies Association – Colonial Section for her dissertation. Titled “Women of the Encomienda: Households and Dependents in Sixteenth-Century Yucatan, Mexico,” the thesis was advised by Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Associate Professor of History. Abrahamson is currently Assistant Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross. Her research and teaching interests include early modern Latin America, indigenous history, the Atlantic world, colonialism, gender, sexuality, and the digital humanities. Abrahamson is among three former or current Emory History Department members recognized by prizes in the 2023 LASA awards cycle. Read the abstract of Abrahamson’s dissertation below.
Over the course of the sixteenth century, multiple Spanish women in Yucatan, Mexico gained and maintained authority over encomiendas, royal grants to Native tributary labor. While the Spanish Crown most often awarded these grants to men as recompense for military service in the conquest of the Americas, dozens of women inherited and held the privileged status of encomendera (encomienda grant holder). My dissertation situates women at the center of encomiendas, colonial households, and relationships of dependent labor and domestic servitude during the first century of colonization in Yucatan. I trace women’s involvement in these institutions from the establishment of colonial settlements in the region in the 1540s through the late sixteenth century: the period during which the encomienda constituted the sole basis of Yucatan’s economy. The reciprocal, yet uneven, relationships of dependency that characterized the encomienda were mirrored in colonial households where Spanish, Maya, and African- descended peoples enacted and contested colonial power dynamics in their everyday lives. I argue that Spanish and Maya women’s increasing involvement in the encomienda over the course of the sixteenth century stabilized the institution and further entrenched it in the region, allowing it to endure in Yucatan for nearly three centuries. This project contributes to discussions regarding the nature of colonialism by examining the means through which women exercised power in European settlements. Spanish women became colonial authorities in their own right through their roles as encomenderas. I also examine instances of resistance in which Maya and African dependents pushed against encomenderas’ power through legal and extralegal means. My project provides new insight regarding how Spanish, Maya, and African women gained, maintained, and contested authority in peripheral settlements throughout the Americas where wealth was grounded in Indigenous labor and agricultural production.
Doctoral candidate William (Robert) Billups has received the prestigious National Fellowship from the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia. The program “supports outstanding scholars at leading institutions of higher education who are completing dissertations in United States politics, with an emphasis on historical and institutional analyses of politics, public policy, and foreign relations.” Billups’s dissertation, “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955–1971,” is advised by Drs. Joseph Crespino and Allen Tullos. The fellowship will provide Billups with financial support during the completion of his dissertation, mentorship from an additional renowned scholar in the field, and opportunities for assembling research networks and cultivating leadership skills. Billups also recently received a fellowship from the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. That fellowship will support Billups’s investigation of violent opposition to school desegregation via court-ordered busing during the 1970s.
Drs. Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Mariana Armond Dias Paes, Co-Leaders of “Land Dispossession, Inequality, and the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America”
During the fall of 2022, Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Mariana Armond Dias Paes of the Max Plank Institute for Legal History received a three-year grant from Emory’s Office of the Provost. Titled “Land Dispossession, Inequality, and the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America,” the project is one of five that will receive a part of $1.4 million in support. The three historians will use the resources to conduct research, develop a digital platform, and initiate several pedagogical innovations focusing on land politics and sustainability in post-emancipation societies in Africa and Latin America. They will be engaging with primary sources located in endangered archives, including Cuba, Cape Verde, and Angola, while also developing new ways of sharing some of this material through public-facing platforms and new courses at undergraduate and graduate level.
The three project leaders point out that their work emerges from a belief that the humanities, and historical approaches in particular, are fields that are uniquely positioned to offer new ways of thinking about land dispossession, rural inequalities, and environmental sustainability. According to Candido, Chira, and Dias Paes, such approaches allow scholars to examine dispossession in the long term, exploring how present-day expulsion from the land is rooted in socio-economic structures dating back to slavery and colonialism. A humanistic approach to land dispossession also sheds light on alternative modes of community-building and property ownership that emerged from below that more quantitative social scientific approaches have ignored. Dias Paes emphasizes that “much of the legal framework of today´s legal system in what concerns property was created in the nineteenth century. Thus, if we want to reform these legal systems in the sense of shifting the current model of exploitation, we must discuss their roots and de-naturalize legal ideas such as ‘absolute ownership right,’ ‘legal personality,’ and so on.”
At the core of the project is a fundamental commitment to collaboration as a tool for writing and practicing better history. Candido and Chira are extremely excited to develop their collaboration with Mariana Dias Paes (with whom Candido has been working for a few years now), an ambitious visionary thinker in the field of legal history. Dias Paes is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt am Main) where she heads the project “Global Legal History on the Ground: Court Cases in African Archives.” In the framework of the project, she has been digitizing over 30,000 court cases stored at the Cape Verde National Archives. Since 2017, together with Mariana Candido and Juelma Ngãla (ISCED-Benguela, Angola), she organized the court cases collection of the Benguela District Court (Angola). Her research focuses on the social and legal history of the South Atlantic (Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau), between the 17th and the 20th centuries. She has published extensively on issues pertaining to judicial disputes over land and labor in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Her publications include: Esclavos y tierras entre posesión y títulos: la construcción social del derecho de propiedad en Brasil, siglo XIX (2021) and Escravidão e direito: o estatuto jurídico dos escravos no Brasil oitocentista, 1860-1888 (2019). She has also published articles in flagship journals such as Law & History Review, Atlantic Studies, Administory-Zeitschrift für Verwaltungsgeschichte. Since 2020, she serves as book review editor of the Journal of Global Slavery. She has been affiliated with international projects funded by the European Commission, the Max Planck Society, and CNPq/Brazil.
Court Cases from 19th and early 20th century located at the larger storage Room/ Deposit at the Benguela Court House (Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela, in Portuguese), Angola, 2019
Smaller Storage Room at the Benguela Court House 2017
Dias Paes began researching the relation between law and slavery while she was in Law School. “It was during my masters, on freedom suits filed by enslaved people in Brazil, that I came to realize that the legal categories structuring these court cases and the legal arguments within them were the same ones used in land disputes. I decided to study this entanglement deeper during my Ph.D., and it became evident that the legal connection between property ownership and land ownership was mutually constitutive with broader economic and social relations. This was such a fascinating topic, that connected historiographical fields that do not often engage with each other, that I decided to pursue this topic further in the following years. For me, it is now clear that the history of slavery and land dispossession in the Global South is the basis of the current climate crisis.”
Asked to explain more about the collaborations that will emerge through the framework of this grant, Dias Paes said the project “will be fundamental to put my own individual research in perspective and access my results in a more complex fashion. When one is doing research individually, time and resources end up restricting the geographical and time scope of our work. Working collaboratively allows us to compare different contexts and thus understand with more complexity local process. Collaboration is fundamental to global and transnational research while allowing us to also conduct meticulous empirical research. Moreover, our project puts together researchers with different backgrounds, historians, and lawyers. This interdisciplinary collaboration will also deepen our debates and analysis. But our collaboration is not restricted to the project. We will also strengthen our partnerships with archival institutions in the Global South. In the age of digital humanities, it is urgent that we put forward debates on digital infrastructure and data sovereignty in Africa and Latin America. Digital humanities projects can both deepen the asymmetries between the Global South and the Global North or it can be an emancipatory tool, that broadens the access of Global South scholars to research infrastructures. Thus, we want our partnerships to be a laboratory on how to do digital humanities in the least asymmetrical way possible. Serious dialogue with our partners will be the key to achieving this goal.”
Learn more about the work of the three project leaders of “Land Dispossession, Inequality, and the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America” on their faculty pages:
The graduate research fellowships committee of the American Society for Environmental History has awarded doctoral candidate Anjuli Webster their 2023 Hal Rothman Dissertation Fellowship. Named in honor of Hal Rothman, recipient of ASEH’s 2006 Distinguished Service award and editor of Environmental History for many years, the fellowship carries an award of $1,000. The prize will help to support research for Webster’s dissertation, titled “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in southern Africa, 1750-1900” and advised by Drs. Clifton Crais, Mariana P. Candido, Yanna Yannakakis, and Thomas D. Rogers.
Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Cahoon Family Professor of American History
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $2.4 million in support of a unique partnership between Emory University and the College of the Muscogee Nation (CMN) centered on Native and Indigenous Studies as well as the preservation of the Mvskoke language. The funding will support collaborative learning communities and research opportunities that link the campuses of Emory and the CMN. Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, helped to forge the partnership between the two institutions, including as part of the the Indigenous Language Path Working Group convened following the reappointment and expansion of President Fenves’ Task Force on Untold Stories and Disenfranchised Populations. Read more about the partnership between Emory and the CMN and the Mellon Foundation award:
Doctoral candidate Robert Billups published an article in the Journal of Southern History, titled “The Cost of Civil Rights: White Supremacist Violence and Economic Resistance against Koinonia Farm during the Civil Rights Era.” The piece offers a unique look at Koinonia Farm, a Christian agricultural community founded in the post-WWII era in southwestern Georgia. By the mid-1950s, Koinonia Farm had grown into a large, self-sustaining interracial commune and commercial farm. Whereas most studies have emphasized the place’s religious and cultural life, Billups’s article offers a deep dive into the financial history of Koinonia, particularly how the farm survived a business climate hostile to its antiracist, pro-Civil Rights positions. Billups is completing his dissertation, “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955–1971,” under the advisement of Drs. Joseph Crespino and Allen Tullos.
Dr. Carol Anderson was recently interviewed by Washington Post senior writer Frances Stead Sellers about her contribution to the bookMyth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past (Basic Books, 2023). Edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, the book aims to upend misinformed myths about American history that the editors see as taking strong root in contemporary popular discourse. Anderson’s chapter, “Voter Fraud,” addresses how misinformation about the frequency and threat of voter fraud have fueled practices of racialized voter suppression. Watch Anderson in conversation with Francis Stead Sellers here and read a excerpt from the transcript of their interview below. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Professor Anderson, you similarly give great historical context to voter suppression, talking particularly about 19th century Mississippi, but can you tell me whether you feel today is different, or are we reliving what you have observed and documented earlier on in U.S. history?
DR. ANDERSON: I’m going to say apocryphally, Mark Twain said history may not repeat itself, but it sure do rhyme. And we are in the rhythms right now. We are rhyming. And so part of what Mississippi did in 1890 was to say, oh, we don’t want Black folks to vote, but because of the 15th Amendment that says that the state shall not abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, then how do we write a law saying we don’t want Black folks to vote without writing a law saying we don’t want Black folks to vote? And Mississippi said, “Got it. What we’re going to use is to use the legacies of slavery and make those legacies of slavery, like poverty and illiteracy, the access to the ballot box. And so you get a poll tax, and you get a literacy test, and you get a Supreme Court that blessed both of those policies on high, and that led to this massive disfranchisement of Black folks that you saw in the South with the poll tax and the literacy test.
Now you think about what happened in the U.S. after Shelby County v. Holder, whereas the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act, the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act, and you had these states implement these policies that on its surface looked race neutral, like voter ID. But in fact, they were racially targeted.
These state legislatures went through, and they looked at, by race, who had what types of government-issued photo IDs and then made the ones that Whites had the primary access to the ballot box.
In Alabama, for instance, they said you must have government-issued photo ID, but your public housing ID does not count for access to the ballot box. Now that looks like race neutral, except 71 percent of those who had public housing IDs in Alabama were African American, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund found that for many, it was the only government-issued photo ID that they had.
And also note that what they used, just like Mississippi in 1890, was the language of “cleaning up” the ballot box, “ending corruption” at the ballot box. We must have “election integrity,” except just like in Mississippi in 1890, there wasn’t the kind of individual voter fraud that could change an election that we’re seeing, that we were seeing back then.
Two History Department faculty members have received a grant from a program within the Emory Office of the Provost designed to foster research and scholarly work that advances social justice. Dr. Mariana P. Candido, Associate Professor, and Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor, are collaborating on a project titled “Land Dispossession, Inequality and the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America.” The project envisions the creation of an open-access digital resource on these themes, two undergraduate courses at Emory, and trips to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Read a fuller description of the initiative below, along with other projects funded through this program: “Emory awards funds for five faculty projects focused on arts and social justice.”
“This project, conducted in collaboration with Mariana Dias Paes at the Max Planck Institute for Law and Legal Theory, will study land dispossession in Africa and Latin America and establish an open-access digital resource that shares critical historical documents, transcripts, legal papers and other records relating to the topic. The grant also funds the creation of two undergraduate courses on the politics of development, rural transformation and food sovereignty that will combine a trip to Puerto Rico and Cuba with in-class instruction.“
