Congratulations to graduate student Anjuli Webster on being selected as a dissertation fellow for Emory’s upcoming Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Visions of Slavery: Histories, Memories, and Mobilizations of Unfreedom in the Black Atlantic.” Funded by a $225,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the seminar will bring together scholars at Emory and Atlanta-area universities to examine the “manifold ways slavery in the Black Atlantic has been archived, interpreted, memorialized, mobilized, and resisted.” Webster’s nine-month fellowship will provide opportunities to participate in planning the seminar, as well as support for conducting research and presenting findings related to the seminar’s central theme. Webster’s dissertation, advised by Drs. Clifton Crais, Mariana P. Candido, and Yanna Yannakakis, is titled “Water’s Power: Ecologies of Sovereignty, Race, and Resistance in south Indianic Africa.”
Category / Research
Graduate Student Jessica Markey Locklear Participates in UMBC Roundtable
Doctoral student Jessica Markey Locklear recently participated in a conversation hosted by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Albin O. Kuhn Library. Titled “Indigenous Community Archiving and Collective Memory,” the virtual roundtable centered on community archiving projects within American Indian communities of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Locklear was joined in the conversation by Siobhan Hagan (founding director, Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive), Tiffany Chavis (Consulting Archivist, UMBC), and Ashley Minner (Assistant Curator for History and Culture, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian). Locklear’s dissertation, advised by Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, is titled “The Other Lands We Know: Lumbee Migrations and the Maintenance of Indian Identity, 1880-1980.”
Amelia Golcheski Wins Dissertation Research Fellowship from UNC’s Wilson Library
Congratulations to graduate student Amelia Golcheski on receiving a Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The $3,500 fellowship will support a one month residency at the Wilson Special Collections Library. Golcheski’s dissertation, advised by Drs. Jason Morgan Ward and Allen Tullos, is titled “Compensating Care: The Professionalization of Women’s Care Labor in Appalachia, 1968-2000.”
History Major Isabel Coyle Wins George P. Cuttino Scholarship
Congratulations to junior History Major Isabel Coyle on winning a George P. Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad. Coyle will conduct research in France for her Honors thesis over the summer of 2022. She will also be a Halle Institute Undergraduate Global Research Fellow. Her working title is “Immigration, Race, and Assimilation in France, 1962-1975.”
She writes that Prof. Judith A. Miller’s “support has helped me so much, and I have such great memories from the French Revolution class as well as the Origins of Capitalism class.” She owes “a lot to Dr. Maria Montalvo, who taught the first history class I ever took at Emory and is one of the reasons I decided to major in history.”
The prize is named for Prof. George Cuttino (1914-1991), who taught at Emory for 32 years. He was a beloved professor and held the Candler Chair in Medieval History. He was a two-time Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and chaired the Emory History Department in the early 1970’s before retiring in 1984.
The summer fellowship recipients will present their research to the department at an event this coming fall semester.
Loren & Gail Starr Award in Experiential Learning Awarded to History Major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo
The Department of History is delighted to award one of the new Loren & Gail Starr Awards in Experiential Learning to Honors student and film studies major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo for the Summer of 2022. She will create short animated film, “Backwards,” about the historical connections between the Covid-19 pandemic and Asian exclusion laws.
Kheyal’s work in stop motion films has been winning praise. Last December, she received the Women in Film and Television Atlanta 2021 Scholarship. Recent projects include “The Great Escape” & “My Bunny’s Story.” Check out her YouTube channel: www.tinyurl.com/KheyalRM.
She writes that “All of the History faculty I have taken classes from have been fantastic!” and praises the department for being so supportive. “It has always encouraged me to draw on my love of film in my historical studies,” she explains. She expressed special thanks to her advisor, Prof. Chris Suh, who has encouraged Kheyal to make films since her first year at Emory. Kheyal notes that “Not only has he taught me so much about Asian American history, but he has taught me how Asian American filmmakers have tacked historical (and current) social and political issues.”
Established in 2022 through a generous donation, the Loren & Gail Starr Award provides summer funding for experiential learning projects proposed by History majors, joint majors, or minors. The Starr Award is intended to support students who wish to use the knowledge and skills they have acquired in history courses to create or participate in projects in settings outside of the classroom. Bold, creative, and off-the-beaten path proposals are encouraged. The only rule is that engagement with the past be central to the experience undertaken by the student. We will offer a second round of these awards in the fall.
We look forward to seeing “Backwards” at the end of the summer! This fall, all of the winners of our summer funding awards will make presentations on their projects and their research experiences to the History Department.
History Major Wittika Chaplet Wins George P. Cuttino Scholarship
Congratulations to junior History Major Wittika Chaplet on winning a George P. Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad. Chaplet will conduct research in France and Burkina Faso for her Honors thesis over the summer of 2022. Her working title is “West African Visions of a Verdant Urban Future: A Microhistory of Burkina Faso’s Urban Gardens.”
She writes that “Dr. Clifton Crais, Dr. Thomas Rogers, Dr. Mariana Candido, & Dr. Susan Gagliardi have been wonderfully supportive through the process of proposing my honor’s thesis.” Moreover, “Dr. Anouar El Younssi supported me from the very beginning of my time at Emory & has been immensely helpful over the past three years.”
The prize is named for Prof. George Cuttino (1914-1991), who taught at Emory for 32 years. He was a beloved professor and held the Candler Chair in Medieval History. He was a two-time Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and chaired the Emory History Department in the early 1970’s before retiring in 1984.
The summer fellowship recipients will present their research to the department at an event this coming fall semester.
Chira Receives NEH Summer Stipend and Postdoc at Harvard
Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of History, has been awarded two external grants to support work on her new project, “In the Plantations’ Shadow: Black Peasants and Land Claims in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spanish Equatorial Guinea, 1850-1950.” Chira received an NEH Summer Stipend for this coming summer and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University for AY 2022-23 to work on the same project. Chira’s first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race Beyond Cuba’s Plantations, was published by Cambridge earlier this year. Congratulations, Professor Chira!
Danielle Lee Wiggins (PhD ’18) Wins ACLS Fellowship
Dr. Danielle Lee Wiggins, Assistant Professor at the California Institute of Technology and a 2018 graduate of the PhD program, has won a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Wiggins is one of sixty scholars nationwide selected for the prestigious ACLS Fellowship, which recognizes outstanding scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The fellowship will support Wiggins’s work on her current manuscript project, titled “The Politics of Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Politics.” Jimmy Carter Professor of History Dr. Joseph Crespino served as Wiggins’s advisor at Emory. Read the abstract of Wiggins’s project below.
“This project examines how black political leaders in Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s managed three challenges associated with the postindustrial urban crisis—crime, family instability, and joblessness— with what this project calls the ‘politics of black excellence.’ This approach entailed the expansion of existing practices of racial uplift into the realm of policy. Adherents sought to discipline black people with policies purported to fortify black communities against the internal threat of ‘black-on-black’ crime, restore the black nuclear family, and cultivate diligent black workers. This study argues that in proposing reform of the self, the family, and black communities as solutions to structural crises, Atlanta’s black political class innovated new modes of black politics and Democratic governance.“
History Honors Student Becca Frischling Wins James L. Roark Prize in American History
Many congratulations to Emory History Honors student, Becca Frischling, who has won the James L. Roark Prize in American History for summer travel to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, NY. She’s working on politically-oriented theatrical and choral organizations within the early-20th century Yiddish labor movement. Her working title is ”Freedom in Song: Examining the Workmen’s Circle, Choral Music, & Theater within the American Yiddish Labor Movement, 1921-1939.” Prof. Jonathan Prude is her Honors director.
She is especially grateful to Dr. Prude for his guidance. She writes that she has “taken 2 great classes with him.” She has also enjoyed classes with Prof. Eric Goldstein, Prof. Jason Ward, & Prof. Judith Miller.
The award honors James L. Roark, who was the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History and taught at Emory from 1983 to 2016. A first generation college student, Professor Roark embarked on an academic journey that took him from community college to Nigeria with the Peace Corps, to Stanford for his doctorate, and to Emory as one of his generation’s most influential historians of the American South. Professor Roark was, above all, a steward of the Emory community, having mentored hundreds of undergraduate students, advised groundbreaking theses, and served two terms as Department Chair. Prior to his retirement, Professor Roark was known throughout the Emory community as a revered professor, trusted colleague, and beloved mentor. As such, the James L. Roark Prize is not only an invitation to conduct research, but also a charge to honor Professor Roark’s legacy of service to the Emory community. Former students Ben Leiner and Naveed Amalfard led the effort to create this fellowship in 2016.
This fall, all of the winners of our summer funding awards will make presentations on their projects and their summer research experiences to the History Department. We look forward to hearing about Becca’s summer! Many congratulations, again, Becca!
Loren and Gail Starr Award in Experiential Learning Given to History Major Matthew Croswhite
The Department of History is delighted to award one of the new Loren & Gail Starr Awards in Experiential Learning to Emory History major Matthew Croswhite for the Summer of 2022. He will create a website about the Emory mascot, Dooley, and its possible link to the cadaver trade associated with Emory’s School of Medicine. He’s exploring the broader context of the possible racist practices by the school that influenced the creation of Dooley. His tentative title is “Skeletons in the Closet: Emory University’s Position in the Illicit Cadaver Trade and the History of Dooley the Skeleton.”
He explains that, “My directed study with Dr. [Matthew] Payne has been the most impactful on my experience as a history major and in developing my understanding of the field of history. The 398R Research Tutorial I took with Dr. Payne last spring particularly has been a great boon in the development of this project, for the focus of this research was also Dooley.”
Established in 2022 through a generous donation, the Loren and Gail Starr Award provides summer funding for experiential learning projects proposed by History majors, joint majors, or minors. The Starr Award is intended to support students who wish to use the knowledge and skills they have acquired in history courses to create or participate in projects in settings outside of the classroom. Bold, creative, and off-the-beaten path proposals are encouraged. The only rule is that engagement with the past be central to the experience undertaken by the student. We will offer a second round of these awards in the fall.
We look forward to seeing Matt’s website at the end of the summer! This fall, all of the winners of our summer funding awards will make presentations on their projects and their research experiences to the History Department. Many congratulations, again, Matt!
Some of you might know that Matt’s mother, Prof. Annette Finley-Croswhite, earned her doctorate in French History at Emory. We were so happy when Matt chose to come to Emory and then to Major in History!