President Jimmy Carter recently visited Prof. Tehila Sasson’s class, “Origins of Human Rights.” The students engaged the President on foreign policy, civil rights, decolonization, the Camp David Accords, and the Cold War. President Carter answered questions ranging from the hostage crisis in Iran, women’s rights, North Korea, to human rights in the age of Trump.
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.
Two History Department courses made the list of 19 notable offerings for Emory’s undergraduates this fall. Professor Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of American History, will teach a seminar course titled “Atticus Finch and American History.” Professor Tehlia Sasson, Assistant Professor of History, is offering “Origins of Human Rights.” Read the course descriptions below, and check out other compelling fall 2017 offerings around campus here.
Atticus Finch and American History
“Since its publication in 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has been one of the most widely read books in the world. The recent publication of Lee’s apprentice novel, Go Set A Watchman has renewed interest in the figure of Atticus Finch and the historical and cultural sources that influenced Lee. This seminar examines the history of the American South in the Jim Crow era that prefigured both the idealized Atticus of Mockingbird and the reactionary Atticus of Watchman. The class will analyze the political uses to which this character has been put since Mockingbird’s publication.”
Origins of Human Rights
“This course recovers the multiple histories of human rights from their deep origins in the 1750s to their more recent formations in the 1990s. It focuses on the history of Europe and its engagement with the wider world: looking at how Europe has shaped and was shaped by Africa, South Asia and the United States over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The goal will be to analyze how the evolution of human rights became part of our contemporary framework of politics, law and culture.”
The Emory News Center recently published a profile on the spring 2017 course “History of Now,” taught by Drs. Astrid M. Eckert and Matthew Payne. The co-taught class is structured around the examination of contemporary events — ranging from Russian presidential politics to Brexit — in historical context. Pitched an introductory level, the course has drawn an array of students across disciplines and year from Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences. Read the full Emory News Center article (“‘History of Now’ helps students understand roots of current conflicts”) and check out the course description below.
The course covers European history from the devastation of World War II to Europe’s current predicaments, such as the Ukrainian crisis, the Brexit decision, and refugee movements. Team-taught by specialists on German and Russian history, the course takes an expansive view of what constitutes Europe and considers select topics in European postwar history such as postwar affluence, détente, war memories, environmental challenges, and others, from western, central and eastern European perspectives. It traces how experiences of the war years rippled through postwar Europe, merged with Cold War exigencies, and reverberated in new ways after the fall of Communism. The course offers students not only an overview of postwar European history but also introduces them to ways of analysing current events in regard to their deep roots in the continent’s past.
PhD alumnus (’11) Adam T. Rosenbaum published an article in the March edition of Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association. The publication, “Leading by Example: The Senior Thesis and the Teacher-Scholar,” charts Rosenbaum’s novel approach to teaching a seminar in which undergraduates write a capstone thesis. Rosenbaum was recently tenured at Colorado Mesa University and his book, Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950, was published by Cambridge UP in 2016. Check out an excerpt below and read the full piece in Perspectives here.
“As I prepared to teach the course a second time, I decided to make some changes. I rewrote the syllabus with a narrower focus on the history of the Third Reich, abandoning the topical flexibility of the first incarnation. I created a five-page bibliography of English-language sources related to that subject, providing students with a significant head start. Then I had another idea: I would write a thesis paper alongside my students, completing all the assignments along the way.”
Three graduate students from the History Department are teaching courses this spring to Emory undergraduates. Professors Julia López Fuentes, Audrey Henderson, and Jennifer E. Morgan designed and developed original courses as a part of the Laney Graduate School’s TATTO program. This opportunity provides graduate students with valuable teaching experience and comprises part of the Department’s holistic training for future teachers and scholars.
Check out the syllabi for the Spring 2017 offerings below and browse the courses from Spring 2016, as well.
Photo from the Bom Retiro neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil, the test case for “Metropolis, Migration and Mosquitoes.” Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, History Department Chair and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, will co-teach an interdisciplinary course, “Metropolis, Migration and Mosquitoes,” in the spring semester 2017. Recently featured by the Emory News Center as a timely, creative, and cool course, the class will be led by Lesser along with Uriel Kitron, Goodrich C. White Professor and Chair of Environmental Sciences, and Ana Teixeira, Director of the Portuguese Language Program and Lecturer in Portuguese, Spanish & Portuguese. Guest lecturers will include Thomas D. Rogers, Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History. Check out the course description below, and browse some of Emory’s other unique offerings this semester.
The course will analyze how “health” has been understood over time by both populations and providers using diverse methodologies, both traditional and novel. Using the Bom Retiro neighborhood of São Paulo as a test case, students will analyze disease patterns and prevention within a historical perspective. They will also analyze how questions of class, race and gender have led to historically different incidences of, and responses to, disease, understanding the relationship between cultural attitudes, exposure to diseases and access to health care.
Dr. Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History, recently delivered a lecture on the California Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century on CSPAN’s “Lectures in History” program. The lecture comes from a section of the class “American Environmental History” that Allitt gave on Emory’s campus in Atlanta on 19 September 2016. Check out the 50-minute lecture on the CSPAN website.
The Emory News Center recently featured two History Department courses in a piece examining offerings across the campus this semester that are engaging contemporary politics and especially the 2016 election. The courses from the Department are: “Race and the American Presidency” (Dr. Brett Gadsden) and “Popular Culture and Politics in the United States” (Dr. Daniel LaChance). Read more about each of the courses at “Unprecedented election cycle provides focus for courses.”
Congratulations to Dr. James V.H. Melton, Professor of History, whose most recent book was awarded the Austrian Studies Book Prize by the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Melton’s work, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. The prize marks the second in as many years for an Emory historian of German-speaking Europe, following Professor Brian Vick‘s award last year for The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Harvard University Press, 2014).
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