Dr. Joseph Crespino recently appeared on 11 Alive to discuss the life and legacy of Dolly Parton, who died at the age of 80 on August 25, 2026. Crespino discussed Parton’s uniquely broad appeal amid stark political and cultural polarization. An expert on the history of the United States with a focus on the U.S. South since Reconstruction, Crespino also highlighted Parton’s impact on global perceptions of the peoples and cultures of the rural South, particularly Appalachia.
Crespino is Senior Associate Dean of Faculty, Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Jimmy Carter Professor of History.
The Emory History Department is pleased to welcome four new doctoral students for the fall 2026 semester. Browse abridged profiles of the new graduate cohort below and follow the links to read their full biographies on the History Department website.
Asa Ackerly received his B.A. from Boston College. Framed by Latin American environmental and economic history, his research examines the different development models that Mexico pursued in the nineteenth century to accelerate economic growth and advance national sovereignty. His advisors are Drs. Thomas D. Rogers and Yanna Yannakakis.
Theophilus Humphrey is an Atlanta native and received his B.A. and M.A. from Georgia State University. He studies the labor, entrepreneurial networks, and community institutions that African Americans built across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paying particular attention to the Sweet Auburn district. His advisors are Drs. Crystal Sanders and Carl Suddler.
Micah Lynn received his B.A. from the University of Southern Mississippi and M.A. from the University of Kentucky. Lynn studies the intersection of racial violence, memory, and place in the American South and its borderlands. He aims to use oral history to extend the study of lynching further into the 20th century. His advisors are Prof. Hank Klibanoff, Dr. Allen E. Tullos, and Dr. Jason Morgan Ward.
Sophie Reed received her B.A. from the University of Michigan. She is interested in race and ethnicity, media studies, women and gender studies with a focus on health, disability studies, cultural history, American studies, and archives. Her interdisciplinary research sociohistorically contextualizes the phenomenon of culturally-mediated eating disorders and body image in minority populations in the US across the 20th century. Her graduate advisors are Drs. Eric L. Goldstein, Ellie R. Schainker, and Chris Suh.
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.
Latin American 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.” Kaelyn McAdam, a doctoral student in Ancient history, completed her dissertation, “Understanding the Graeculi: A Greek Roman Empire in the Third and Fourth Centuries,” and graduated in the summer of 2025. Five other graduate students received their interim master’s.
Departmental leadership, faculty, and staff celebrate these exceptional, collective accomplishments of the 2025-’26 academic year.
Yuan Zeng Ashley Tan (Fall 2025) Advisor: Tonio Andrade
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
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.”
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
