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Rall Wins Scobie Award from Conference on Latin American History

Congratulations to graduate student Ursula Rall on receiving the James R. Scobie award from the Conference on Latin American History. The Scobie provides up to $1,500 for an exploratory research trip abroad to determine the feasibility of a Ph.D. dissertation topic dealing with some facet of Latin American history. Rall’s project is entitled, “The Spatial Mobility of African and Afro-Descended Women in the Colonial Spanish Americas.” Rall is advised by Drs. Yanna Yannakakis and Javier Villa-Flores. Read more about the project and Rall’s field research plans below.

The pre-dissertation research I plan to do this summer will explore the migration patterns of free and enslaved women of African descent in the seventeenth century centered on urban New Spain. Depending on travel restrictions and archive access, this research will either happen in Mexico City or within the United States at the Gilcrease Museum and Tulane University Library. This archival work will help determine the feasibility of my dissertation work, in which I plan to the trace patterns of spatial mobility of free and enslaved women of African descent and the social connections they made and maintained.

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Cors and Goldmon Named Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows

Congratulations to doctoral candidates Alexander Cors and Camille J. Goldmon on being named 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows. Cors and Goldmon are among 72 graduate students nationwide to receive the fellowship, which supports the next generation of humanistic scholars in their final year of dissertation research and writing. Cors’s project, titled “Newcomers and New Borders: Migration, Property Formation, and Conflict over Land along the Mississippi River, 1750-1820,” offers a new perspective on the “periodization and geographies of North American history by viewing colonial expansion, Indigenous dispossession, and the rise of the slave-plantation economy as interconnected processes that spanned across national and imperial boundaries.” Goldmon’s project, “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940,” reexamines “historical figures typically dismissed as conservative, unprogressive, or even apathetic and positions them instead as harbingers of change responsive to the needs of local Black farmers.” Read more about their exciting work in the links above and browse the projects of the other fellows in the 2021 ACLS cohort.

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Anderson Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Department Chair, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Anderson was one of five Emory faculty elected to the American Academy this year, the highest number for a single year in the university’s history. Read the Emory News Center’s summary of Anderson’s work below, along with their article about all five newly-elected Emory faculty. Also see the American Academy’s press release to read about the entire cohort of 252 faculty members elected this year.

Anderson is a nationally recognized historian, educator and author whose research and teaching focus on the ways that policy is made and unmade, how racial inequality and racism affect that process and outcome, and how those who have taken the brunt of those laws, executive orders and directives have worked to shape, counter, undermine, reframe, and, when necessary, dismantle the legal and political edifice used to limit their rights and humanity.

Anderson is the author of “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy,” which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in nonfiction. Her other books include “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide,” a New York Times bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016 and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner; “Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955,” and “Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960.”

Anderson is the recipient of grants and fellowships sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She was awarded a 2018 fellowship in Constitutional Studies by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Her work as a public scholar includes serving on working groups dealing with race, minority rights and criminal justice at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, the United Nations, and as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. She also is on the advisory board of Partners for Dignity and Human Rights.

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Dr. Abigail Meert (PhD, ’19) Wins NEH Fellowship

Congratulations to Dr. Abigail Meert, a 2019 PhD graduate in African history, on winning a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Meert received a summer stipend for her project “Suffering, Struggle, and the Politics of Legitimacy in Uganda, 1958–1996.” She will conduct archival research in Uganda and the United Kingdom along with semi-structured follow-up interviews with previous informants. The expected outcome of the research is an academic article as part of her book project on the Ugandan Civil War from 1981–1986. Meert is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M International University.

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Smith Publishes Review Essay in ‘Southern Spaces’

Dr. Kylie M. Smith, Associate Professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has published a review essay in the Emory-headquartered journal Southern Spaces. The essay, “Psychiatry in the Wake: Racism and the Asylumed South,” centers on two recent publications: Mab Segrest’s Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum (The New Press, 2020) and Wendy Gonaver’s The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880 (UNC Press, 2019).

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Honors Student Cameron Katz Discusses Experience as Undergraduate Fellow at the Fox Center

History major and honors student Cameron Katz recently published a piece on the blog of Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry reflecting on her time as an undergraduate humanities fellow. Katz discusses her research, which centers on Florida’s felony disenfranchisement law, as well as how the pandemic has shaped her experience as a student and scholar. Read an excerpt from the post below, along with the full piece: “Shared Scholarship During the Pandemic.”

“The opportunity to present my research to a group of scholars was also very beneficial. My history honors thesis examines the racial implications of Florida’s felony disenfranchisement law – the rule which revokes a person’s right to vote on account of a felony conviction – which was on the books from 1838 to 2018. Because my temporal framework is so large, working to condense it to a short presentation for an audience less familiar with the history really helped me to streamline my main argument, which I think is one of the most challenging aspects of large projects. Hearing feedback about my presentation allowed me to narrow my presentation even further so that I could convey my work in an accessible and informative manner. Later this month, I will be presenting my research at the Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Symposium so the additional practice at the Fox Center has helped me to prepare.“

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Undergraduate Honors Students Present Thesis Proposals Throughout April

Throughout the month of April History majors at Emory are presenting their honors thesis proposals via Zoom. Their fifteen research projects range widely in period, place, and theme, from an analysis of African-American funeral directors in Jim Crow Georgia to a study of diplomatic relations between Russian cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts. Read about the student projects (including their faculty mentors) by clicking on the flyers below, and email Ms. Lakesia Hayes for the zoom link to the final round of presentations on Monday, April 26, from 2:40-4pm EDT.

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Montalvo Publishes Chapter in ‘Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century’

Dr. Maria R. Montalvo, Assistant Professor of History, published a chapter in the recently-released edited collection Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century (LSU Press, 2021). Montalvo’s chapter, “Bernard Kendig: Orchestrating Fraud in the Market and the Courtroom,” investigates the deceptive and violent business dealings of a New Orleans trader in enslaved people. Montalvo’s work centers on histories of slavery, capitalism, and the law in the nineteenth-century United States.

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Lesser to Present Opening Lecture at Federal University of Paraná

Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Reserch, will deliver the opening lecture for the history graduate program at the Federal University of Paraná. Lesser’s lecture, titled “Structural Health: Immigrants, the State and Urban Geography in São Paulo, 1870-2020,” draws from his research based in the Bom Retiro neighborhood of the city of São Paulo. The lecture will be livestreamed on YouTube on April 28 at 4pm EDT.

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Crespino Discusses the Future of the Filibuster on “Political Rewind”

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor and Department Chair, was recently a guest on the Georgia Public Broadcasting show “Political Rewind.” The episode focused on the role of the filibuster in creating deadlock in the U.S. Senate. Crespino was a panelist alongside former U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, Steven Dennis (Congressional Reporter, Bloomberg News), and Tamar Hallerman (Senior Reporter, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Listen to the show at the following link: “Political Rewind: In Deadlocked Senate, Some Question If It Is Time To End The Filibuster.”