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Celebrating 2026 History Department Graduates


Emory’s 2026 Commencement ceremonies took place May 7-11, 2026, and the History Department had many reasons to celebrate. 25 History undergraduate majors or joint majors walked across the stage. Seven of those, after completing compelling original theses under the advisement of dedicated faculty, graduated with honors in History. Doctoral candidate Alejandro Guardado defended his dissertation, titled “Indigenous Intellectuals, Cultural Brokers, and the Struggle for Native Self-Determination in Late Twentieth-Century Oaxaca, Mexico,” becoming the newest PhD to graduate from Emory’s highly-ranked Latin American History program.

Departmental leadership, faculty, and staff celebrate these exceptional, collective accomplishments of the 2025-’26 academic year.

Expand the sections below to learn more about the graduating students. Also catch a replay of the 2026 Emory College Honors Ceremony and browse photos of the Commencement ceremonies.

The following undergraduates completed either a major or joint major in History and were recognized at the 2026 commencement:

Lucia Kumari Alexeyev
Adrien Jonah Dolin Armstrong
Daniel Hays Bell
Kennedie Amanda Black
Ciera Merie Butler
Edmund Humphrey Cayley
Georgios Drakos
Chloe Nanci Glazer
Mya D. Green*
Isaac Paul Jaye
Jiarui Jiang
Thora Jordt
Alice Liu**
Victoria Mia Maza
Isabella J. Mazet
Lola Kate McGuire
Rachel Elizabeth Mehler
Javier Andres De Jesus Montano
Leo Abraham Raykher
Dylan Robert Sanders Villegas
Joel Moa Shin
Siya Sanjeev Thadani
Xipei Wan
Megan Xing
Yiqi Zhang

* Graduating summer 2026
** Graduating fall 2026

The following students completed honors thesis and graduated with honors in History.

Lucia Kumari Alexeyev, “Vieques Se Levanta: A History of Health Amidst Occupation”
Faculty Director: Professor Jeffrey Lesser

Daniel Bell, “Public Men in Glass Houses: Herbert Jenkins and the Remaking of the Atlanta Police Department, 1947-1972”
Faculty Director: Professor Joseph Crespino

Edmund Cayley, “The First East Turkestan Republic: The Rise of 20th Century Uyghur Nationalism”
Faculty Director: Professor Matthew Payne

Lola McGuire, “‘This stand I make is not alone’: Uncovering the Chicago Young Patriots Organization Women, 1968-1973”
Faculty Director: Professor Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez

Leo Raykher, “Economics, Espionage, Exile: The Surveilled Life of David Drucker, Esq.”
Faculty Director: Professor Jonathan Prude

Siya Thadani, “Medicalizing Difference: Science and the Making of Race in the British Empire”
Faculty Director: Professor Chris Suh

Thomas Wan, “For the Nation and the Revolution: Inner Mongols in the Shadow of Empire and Civil War (1931-49)”
Faculty Director: Professor Matthew Payne

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Fox Center Honors Fellows Bell and Raykher Present Theses


Senior History majors Daniel Bell and Leo Raykher recently presented their honors theses as part of the 2025-’26 cohort of Fox Center Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellows. A senior double-majoring in Economics, Bell’s thesis examines the life and career of Herbert Jenkins, Atlanta’s influential twentieth-century police chief. Raykher’s research explores espionage, surveillance, and political freedom in the United States through the life of his great, great-uncle, David Drucker, a strident advocate for socialist causes and political exile in Mexico.

Both projects echo the Fox Center’s 2025-’26 theme, Life/Story, which “draws its inspiration from the many ways humanities fields and disciplines often approach a single life as the entry point for examining broad political, socio-cultural, and historical phenomena.”

by emoryhistorydept

Celebrating 2026 Senior Prize Winners


The Undergraduate Committee is pleased to announce the recipients of the Emory History Department’s undergraduate senior prizes for the 2025-26 academic year. These awards were presented at our annual Senior Celebration on Tuesday, April 28, from 1:00-3:00 pm, in the Brooks Commons.

Congratulations to the following awardees for their outstanding work in history:

The African, Asian, and Latin American History Prize for best record in African, Asian, and Latin American History

🙞 Lucia Alexeyev 🙜

James Z. Rabun Prize for the best record in American History

🙞 Kennedie Black 🙜

George P. Cuttino Prize for the best record in European History

🙞 Edmund Cayley 🙜

James Z. Rabun Prize for the best record in American History

🙞 Chloe Glazer 🙜

Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award

🙞 Lola McGuire 🙜

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Emory Students Analyze “Sports, Power, and Society” in Course Co-Taught by Suddler


In the spring 2026 semester, Dr. Carl Suddler, Associate Professor of History, and Emory sociologist Dr. Karida Brown have offered an interdisciplinary course called “Sports, Power, and Society.” Building on the “Last Lectures” series, a curriculum developed by Civil Rights icon and sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards, the course analyzes how sport intersects with an array of topics, from race, politics, and fashion to urban planning, inequality, and global power.

Students in the spring course have benefitted from the proximity of the upcoming FIFA World Cup, which will bring the high-stakes global soccer to Atlanta and 15 other host cities in North America this summer. Atlanta and Los Angeles are the only two cities in the U.S. to host both a summer Olympic games and the World Cup. This fact, Suddler and Brown argue, have made Emory the ideal place to study the power of sport in shaping culture, cities, economies, and everyday life.

Emory History graduate students Andrew Aldridge (U.S. History, 5th year) and Tymesha-Elizabeth Kindell (U.S. History, 2nd year) serve as teaching assistants for the course.


Fox 5 Atlanta recently interviewed Suddler about the offering, the World Cup’s impact on Atlanta, and parallels between the 2026 mega event and the 1996 Olympics. Find the conversation here: “Emory offers class on impact of FIFA World Cup.”

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Byrnes (PhD, ’14) Publishes ‘The United States and the Ends of Empire’


Dr. Sean T. Byrnes, a 2014 graduate of the doctoral program in U.S. history, recently published his second book, The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776, with Bloomsbury Press. The four-century history examines the relationship between the United States, empire, and decolonization from the revolutionary war through the present.

Fellow Emory History Department alum Dr. Elizabeth Stice (Palm Beach Atlantic University) recently interviewed Byrnes about his new monograph. Find their conversation here: “Interview with Sean Byrnes, author of ‘The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776.’”

Byrnes’s research centers on U.S. politics, international relations, and global economic inequality. His first book, Disunited Nations: U.S. Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, was published by LSU Press in 2021. His writings have also appeared in Time, The New Republic, Dissent, Jacobin, Diplomatic History, Diplomatica, International Journal, and for the History News Network. He hosts conversations with authors on the New Books Network, serves on the Board of Editors for Federal History, and is a Section Editor for the newly released Routledge Online Encyclopedia of the Cold War.

Byrnes completed his doctoral training under the advisement of Dr. Fraser Harbutt.

Read an abstract of the Byrnes’s new book below and learn more via Bloomsbury Press.

Few topics are more important to understanding the origins of the modern world than decolonization, and few countries have played a more important role in that history than the United States.In this book, Sean T. Byrnes provides a definitive, single-volume account of the relationship between the United States, decolonization, and world order.

Through a lively narrative history that ranges across four centuries, Byrnes reveals how the process of ending and replacing empires defined the American relationship to the world from the colonial era to the present. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution, hierarchies born of the imperial age—and defined by ideas about race, capitalism, and civilization—fundamentally shaped American views of who was entitled to sovereignty and when. Therefore, far from building a world of “Westphalian” sovereign equality, the United States instead manipulated, expanded, and then attempted to dominate globe spanning structures of wealth and power that served the few at the expense of the many.

From early interactions with Native Americans and a decolonizing Latin America, to efforts to bolster global hierarchies after the World Wars and influence the postcolonial “Third World”, The United States and the Ends of Empire, tells the story of a US that may not always have embraced formal empire but nevertheless still sought to organize the world in imperial ways. In the process, it reveals how Americans helped build today’s modern, globalized world—and the unequal hierarchies of wealth and power that define it.

by emoryhistorydept

Mollie Nouwen (PhD, ’08) Promoted at Pacific Northwest College of Art


Dr. Mollie Nouwen, a 2008 doctoral program graduate in Latin American history, has been promoted to full professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) at Willamette University. A specialist in Argentina, immigration, and Modern Latin America, Nouwen is the author of Oy My Buenos Aires: Jewish Immigrants and the Creation of Argentine National Identity (University of New Mexico Press, 2013).


She has served as Chair of Liberal Arts at PNCA since 2020, and her scholarly interests have expanded to include pedagogy, writing, and research in the humanities with a focus on artists and designers. 

Her recently published works include a chapter on pedagogical strategies for teaching Immigration to Latin America and the Handbook of Latin American Studies, published by the Library of Congress, for which she is the Modern Argentina editor. Nouwen completed her dissertation under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.

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Benjamin P. Hein (C, ’10) Publishes ‘The Migrant’s Spirit’ with Cambridge UP


Dr. Benjamin P. Hein, a 2010 Emory History alum and now Assistant Professor at Brown University, has published his first book: The Migrant’s Spirit: How Industrial Modernity Came to the German Lands (Oxford UP, 2025). Weaving economic history and the history of financial institutions with immigration and cultural history, The Migrant’s Spirit locates the impetus for Germany’s industrial modernization in transatlantic exchanges between German society and the expanding German diaspora in nineteenth-century North America.

Hein completed honors in history working with Professors Astrid M. Eckert and Brian Vick. He was awarded the 2010 Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award, given to a graduating student who displays high academic achievement and good works in the community. He received his PhD at Stanford University in 2018.

Read the full description of The Migrant’s Spirit:

When a process popularly known as the Industrial Revolution first took hold in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, many contemporaries were stunned by the scale and ferocity of the transformation. While Germany had long been considered a promising place to industrialize, given its historic ties to New World markets, skilled and educated workforce, and deep pockets of wealth, progress had been slow due to persistent indifference and skepticism across society. That people should have suddenly dropped their reservations and simply embraced the new industrial modernity defied all explanation. Grasping for answers, some concluded that the Germans must have fallen under the spell of the “capitalist spirit.”

Benjamin P. Hein locates the impetus for the abrupt transformation of German society after ca. 1850 in its cultural exchange with the country’s burgeoning diaspora in North America, one of the largest in this century. In correspondence and other “news from America,” the emigrants conveyed to their families, communities, and business associates in Europe a different set of norms and ethics regarding work, entrepreneurship, and commerce. By making it socially acceptable and politically meaningful to frequently change professions or to organize businesses as joint-stock corporations, they inadvertently mobilized an otherwise reluctant population for a more centralized regime of production that served global market forces instead of local needs and corporatist norms. They also helped popularize key institutional pillars of the new economy, like the universal bank, and inspired innovative commercial reforms, most notably the “limited liability partnership” (LLP), or “G.m.b.H.” in German, which became the legal foundation of Germany’s particularly robust small-business economy.

While addressing global trends, The Migrant’s Spirit makes these phenomena comprehensible through the lives of individuals who faced painful choices and moral quandaries as they attempted to navigate a new social and economic order and began to trust countrymen abroad over local sources of guidance. By reconstructing their struggles, Hein sheds new light on the transatlantic dimensions of Germany’s path to industrial modernity.

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History Major Leah Wang Featured among Exemplary Emory Student-Athletes


Emory News recently featured history and business double major Leah Wang among a select group of Emory’s exceptional student-athletes. Wrapping up her junior year at Emory, Wang has been a leader on the pitch, throughout campus, and beyond. She testified before the U.S. congress about Title IX, was selected for the NCAA Division III Student Immersion Program, and served as the founder and president of the Asian and Pacific Islander Student-Athlete group. Find a quote from the feature about Wang below, and read the all the profiles of the featured student-athletes: “How Emory athletes find the Eagle Edge.”

“Balancing my commitments and social life has been challenging, but I’ve been able to maintain strong academic performance, continue to grow as an athlete and build meaningful friendships along the way,” Wang says. “It’s still a work in progress, but I’ve learned to stay grounded and appreciate the opportunities I have.”

by emoryhistorydept

Work of Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board Continues


In December the U.S. Senate passed a bill to extend by four years the work of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. The nonpartisan group is appointed by the U.S. president and dedicated to investigate and release federal records relating to unsolved, racially-motivated murders from the civil rights era (1940-1979). With bipartisan support, the bill now heads to the U.S. House of Representatives.

The cold cases project has strong ties to Emory College and the Emory History Department. Professor Hank Klibanoff, Associated Faculty in History, is co-chair of the review board. Klibanoff directs the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project (to which multiple History students have contributed) and is the creator and host of the award-winning podcast Buried Truths.

CBS News Atlanta recently featured the work of the review board, with a focus on recently-released records about the murder of the grandmother of a resident of Ellenwood, Georgia. Read an excerpt from the CBS News piece below, and find the full article: “Researchers aim to bring truth to light for racially motivated civil rights cold cases.”

“What we are doing is simply trying to, you know, excavate the records and get them released, review them, review them with the FBI, review them with the Department of Justice, review them with the National Archive,” said Emory University Professor Hank Klibanoff, a co-chair for the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board.

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Rosalyn Page: In Memoriam


The Emory History Department mourns the death of Rosalyn Page, who served as the department administrator for more than 25 years before her retirement in 2008. Becky Herring, current department administrator, writes that Rosalyn was “not only a patient and encouraging mentor, she was also a loyal and supportive friend. Her fun-loving spirit, joyful nature, and kind heart will be greatly missed by her loving family and cherished friends.” A funeral service will be held on Thursday, March 12, 2026, at 1:30 pm in Glenn Memorial UMC’s Little Chapel at Emory University in Atlanta. In remembrance, consider a donation to WABE or Friends of Disabled Adults and Children.

Rosalyn’s obituary, chronicling her rich life and character, follows:

Rosalyn Florence Page, beloved mother, sister, aunt and cherished friend, passed away peacefully in Tucker, Georgia, on February 16, 2026, at the age of 82, surrounded by her family and those she held dear.

Born on April 25, 1943, in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, Rosalyn was the first daughter of Joe E. Page and Cora Jane Page. She spent her childhood in Bristow, Oklahoma, and later in Englewood, Colorado, where she developed the curiosity, independence, and love of learning that would shape her life. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Colorado State University, an accomplishment she carried with pride.

Rosalyn married Mike Phillips, and together they raised two children while living in Colorado, Kansas, and ultimately Stone Mountain, Georgia.  Whether substitute teaching, cheering at countless ball games or savoring summer camping, Rosalyn poured her heart into the moment.  Her devotion to her children was unwavering, and she nurtured them with the same warmth, humor, and optimism she offered to everyone she met.

She retired in 2008 from Emory University in Atlanta, where she served for more than 25 years as an Academic Department Administrator in the History Department. Rosalyn found fulfillment in her work, forming lasting friendships with colleagues and students who admired her intelligence, steadiness, and generous spirit.

A woman of many passions, Rosalyn was a longtime member of Glenn Memorial Methodist Church and an enthusiastic participant in the Atlanta Cajun Zydeco Association, where she embraced her love of dance and community. Known for her cheery smile, kindness, and unwaveringly positive outlook, she had a remarkable ability to make others feel seen, valued, and loved — and she never let them forget it.

Rosalyn was a lifelong reader with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, a talented cook and patient seamstress.  She was a dedicated student of the French language, enjoyed yoga and genealogy.  She was a treasured friend to all who knew her. Her presence brought light, laughter, and comfort, and her absence will be felt deeply.

She is survived by her daughter Lisa Phillips (Mike Owens) of Brevard, North Carolina; her son Trace A. Phillips (Jen Moran) of Edwards, Colorado; her sister Melissa Page (Hugh Simpson) of Los Lunas, New Mexico; and her former husband Mike Phillips (Susanne Pinkley) of Alpharetta, Georgia. Rosalyn is also remembered with love by many extended family members and countless friends whose lives she touched.  Her memory will continue to inspire those who were fortunate enough to know her.