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by abritt

Lipstadt Describes “Surrealistic” Experience Testifying in “Unite the Right” Trial

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently recounted what she described as the “surrealistic experience” testifying in the Charlottesville, VA, trial against the organizers of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. Lipstadt served as an expert witness for the trial and was cross-examined by one of the defendants. Read an excerpt from the HuffPost’s coverage of the trial below along with the full article here: “Experts Describe ‘Surrealistic’ Process Of Putting Charlottesville’s Nazis On Trial.”

“On the stand, Lipstadt read aloud some of the planning messages sent by the event’s organizers. She testified that she was ‘taken aback‘ by the level of anti-Semitism and the adulation for Nazi Germany evident in the discussions.

“‘On one hand, I could feel like I was in the classroom, teaching about anti-Semitism and teaching about its connection to white supremacy,’ Lipstadt told HuffPost about her experience as an expert witness. ‘This was a call to arms. This was a call to violence. If you read their statements, it’s just overwhelming.‘”

by abritt

Anderson Discusses Rittenhouse Trial Verdict on WNYC’s ‘The Brian Lehrer Show’

Charles Howard Candler Professor Carol Anderson was recently a guest on the WNYC program ‘The Brian Lehrer Show.’ The conversation centered on the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and injured Gaige Grosskreutz, during protests in Kenosha, WI, in 2020. Listen to the full conversation here: “Professor Carol Anderson on the Rittenhouse Verdict.”

by abritt

Anderson Quoted in ‘AP News’ Article about Vigilantism

Dr. Carol Anderson was recently quoted in the Associated Press News article “2 trials, 1 theme: White men taking law into their own hands.” Following the trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and the three men convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery, the piece examines white vigilantism in historical and contemporary perspective. Anderson’s most recently book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021), charts how anti-Black racism shaped the Second Amendment. Read an excerpt from the AP News piece below, along with the full article here.

“So much of this issue about protection and safety is about the safety and the protection of whites or white property,” said Carol Anderson, historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University. “There is a hubris of whiteness. The sense that it is on me to put Black lives back into their proper place.”

by abritt

Strocchia’s ‘Forgotten Healers’ Wins the Rossiter Prize from the History of Science Society

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia’s book Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard UP, 2020) has been awarded the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize from the History of Science Society. The prize is given annually in recognition of an outstanding book on the history of women in science. Forgotten Healers was also awarded the Marraro Prize by the Society for Italian Historical Studies and the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America. Strocchia is Department Chair and Professor of History. Read more about the Rossiter Prize and browse the list of past winners here.

by abritt

Scully Quoted in ABC’s Digital Essay on Sara Baartman

Dr. Pamela Scully, Vice Provost of Undergraduate Affairs, Professor in WGSS and African Studies, and Affiliated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in a digital essay published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The piece, “The fight for Sarah Baartman,” discusses the life, death, and legacy of Sara Baartman. Scully and Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor of History, co-authored a biography of Baartman in 2009, titled Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton UP). Read the essay here: “The fight for Sarah Baartman.”

by abritt

History Department Announces 2021-’22 Graduate Award Winners

Congratulations to the graduate students who won 2021-’22 awards in the History Department. These awards were formally announced at the fall Department of History party on Friday, October 29. See the names of the winners and details below.

The Ross H. and May B. McLean Prize, awarded annually to the first-year student/s in history who achieved the most distinguished record for the previous year.

The Francis S. Benjamin Prize, awarded for the best paper written by a graduate student during their first two years in the Emory History PhD program.

The Blair Rogers Major and James Russell Major Dissertation Award, given annually to the most promising student writing a dissertation in the history of Europe and of European expansion (including the British Isles), from classical antiquity to the present. 

*As one-time special exception, due to COVID-19 and the inability to award it in 2020-21, two awards were granted in 2021-22.

by abritt

Anderson in ‘The Guardian’: “White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed”

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published an opinion piece in The Guardian. Surveying U.S. history since the eighteenth century, Anderson highlights a pattern of white supremacists endangering U.S. democracy and yet suffering few to no consequences thereafter. Anderson links this historical pattern to the results of current cases brought against the invaders of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece: “White supremacists declare war on democracy and walk away unscathed.”

“This horrific attack on American democracy should have resulted in a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to walk away virtually unscathed. US senators and representatives who were at the rally inciting the invaders were not expelled from Congress. Similarly, in shades of the post- civil war Confederacy, several politicians who attended the incendiary event at the Ellipse were recently re-elected to office. And those who stormed the Capitol are getting charged with misdemeanors, being allowed to go on vacations out of the country, and, despite the attempt to stage a coup and overturn the results of a presidential election, getting feather-light sentences.”

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Dr. Aditya Pratap Deo (PhD, ’13) Publishes ‘Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India’

Congratulations to Dr. Aditya Pratap Deo on the publication of his book Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India: Enchanting the State (Routledge, 2022). Deo, who teaches History at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, completed his dissertation in 2013 under the advisement of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Gyanendra Pandey. Read Routledge’s summary of Kings, Spirits and Memory below.

“Part anthropological history and part memoir, this book is a unique study of the polity of the colonial-princely state of Kanker in central India. The author, a scion of the erstwhile ruling family of Kanker, delves into the oral accounts given in the ancestral deity practices of the mixed tribe-caste communities of the region to highlight popular narratives of its historical polity. As he struggles with his own dilemmas as ethnographer-king, what comes into view is a polity where the princely state is drawn out amidst a terrain of gods and spirits as much as that of law courts and magistrates, and political power is divided, contested and shared between the raja/state and the people. This study constitutes not only an intervention in the larger debate on the relationship between state formations and tribal peoples, but also on the very nature of history as a knowledge practice, especially the understandings of power, authority and sovereignty in it.

“Combining intensive ethnography, complementary archival work and crucial theoretical questions engaging social scientists worldwide, the author charts an unusual explanatory path that can allow us to obtain a meaningful understanding of societies/peoples that have historically been marginalized and seen as different. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of history, anthropology, politics, religion, tribal society and Modern South Asia.“

by abritt

Lipstadt Serves as Expert Witness in Civil Trial Against Organizers of Charlottesville Rally

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, is serving as an expert witness in a civil lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Counterprotesters charge that the rally organizers promoted violence against them based on racial and religious hatred. That violence led to the death of one counterprotester, Heather Heyer, who was killed when white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. In her expert testimony (published here), Lipstadt concludes that “the ideology, symbols, and rhetoric that were on display at the Unite the Right rally fit comfortably within a long tradition of antisemitism and share in the tradition that led to the violent murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust.” Read more about the case in The New York Times article: “For Holocaust Scholar, Another Confrontation With Neo-Nazi Hate.”

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History Dept. Co-Sponsors Rothschild Memorial Lecture Featuring Dahlia Lithwick

The History Department is a co-sponsor of the 13th annual Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild Memorial Lecture, scheduled for Nov. 11 and featuring lawyer, writer, and journalist Dahlia Lithwick. A Supreme Court expert and senior editor at Slate, Lithwick is also Senior Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Kogod Research Center and Lecturer at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she recently taught a course on the legacy of Justice Ginsburg. As a leading commentator on law, politics, and the Supreme Court, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Commentary.

Lithwick will speak on the legacy of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and will also give a faculty/graduate student seminar on the approach of the current Supreme Court to church-state issues. The program will explore the life and jurisprudence of Justice Ginsburg through a Jewish lens, including how her religious upbringing and immigrant background shaped her constitutional worldview and philosophy of what America could and should be. Find more information about the event, including registration, here.

The event is sponsored by Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Center for Ethics, Center for Women, Departments of German Studies, History, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, and Religion, Office of Spiritual and Religious Life, and School of Law.