In the summer of 2025 third-year History major Hannah Lo was a finalist for the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) program. The program supports U.S. citizens to develop foreign language and cultural fluencies through intensive summer training abroad. Lo, who is also minoring in quantitative social sciences, was among only four Emory students accepted for 2025. When the Chinese language program she was planning to attend at China’s Dalian University of Technology was cancelled, Lo pivoted to serve as an immigration intern with Asian Americans Advancing Justice and conducted research with Dr. Yami Rodriguez, Assistant Professor, and Dr. Chris Suh, Associate Professor. Read more about the 2025 Emory CLS cohort here.
The History Department annually awards its Clio Prizes to the best paper in a Freshman History Seminar and the best research paper in a junior or senior History Colloquium. This year, we are pleased to recognize outstanding work by Emma Rose Ceklosky and William Wainwright.
Ceklosky received the prize for the best paper written in a freshman seminar for her work, “From Exotic Blossoms to Budding Women in Science.” Ceklosky completed this paper in Dr. Judith Miller`s spring 2025 freshman seminar “The World of Jane Austen.” About the course, she writes: “I loved the stories I discovered about horticulture and how it empowered 19th-century women. Dr. Miller’s class brought history to life for me. I recommend her to everyone and am honored that she nominated me for this prize.” Ceklosky plans to double-major in English and Creative Writing and Psychology.
Spring 2025 graduate William Wainwright received the prize for the best research paper written in a history junior/senior colloquium for his work “Recentering the Black Sea,” which he completed in Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida`s course “Europe: Merchants-Pirates and the Slave Trade.” Wainwright graduated summa cum laude with a BA in International Relations (highest honors) and History in the spring 2025. Reflecting on the prize and his experience as a major, he writes: “Thank you so much for this. I am honored and grateful to receive this prize. The Emory history department, and Dr. Armstrong-Partida’s class in particular, have been hugely important for my academic development. I look forward to continuing to stay in touch with the professors and staff who have made it possible. Thank you again.”
In the summer of 2025, Emory College senior Lucia Alexeyev conducted research about the relationship between U.S. Naval occupation and residents’ health and access to healthcare on the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico. Alexeyev’s project, titled “Military Occupation and Changing Healthcare Landscapes: Vieques and the U.S. Navy, 1941-2003,” was funded by the History Department’s Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad.
Alexeyev is a History major and Global Health, Culture and Society minor. Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, serves as her thesis adviser. Read an excerpt from the Nueve Millones piece below and find the full article here.
“Even with how politics has changed in the EPA, Estrada Martinez remains hopeful for the study’s completion. She’s inspired by the Viequense community’s 63-year struggle to remove the Navy from the island, plus an additional 20-year battle to obtain funding for VASAC in the first place. ‘This is just a rock on the road, and we will figure out together how to get rid of it and move forward, right?‘”
Season 5 of the podcast Buried Truths, hosted by Professor Hank Klibanoff, Professor of the Practice in Emory’s Creative Writing Program and Associated Faculty in the Department of History, has premiered on WABE. Drawing on research over three semesters that involved 35 Emory undergraduate students, this season investigates “the brutal beating and medical neglect that led to the 1957 death of Rev. Clarence Horatious Pickett, a preacher in Columbus, Georgia.” Read more details about the seven-episode season, titled “A Preacher, a Policeman, and a Physician,” here: “WABE Announces August 26 Premiere of Buried Truths’ Season 5, hosted by Pulitzer and Peabody Award Winner Hank Klibanoff.”
“This story has lived in the margins of history for far too long,” said Buried Truths creator and host Hank Klibanoff. “With the help of research by more than 35 Emory University undergraduate students across three semesters, we’ve tried to give Clarence Pickett the attention and dignity that eluded him in life. His story reveals painful truths—not just about one town or one moment, but about how our systems treat the most vulnerable.”
History Department faculty and students are well represented in the recently-announced 2025-26 cohort of fellows at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Faculty and graduate fellows will conduct research intersecting with this year’s theme, Life/Story, which draws “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.”
Four undergraduate History students will hold Undergraduate Humanities Honors fellowships. These Fellowships support undergraduates as they complete their honors theses, introduce them to the life of the Humanities, and provide a venue for interdisciplinary interchange, mentorship, and conference-style presentation.
View short profiles of the faculty and student fellows below and follow the links to more extended biographies.
Hwisang Cho (Associated Faculty in History) specializes in the cultural, intellectual, and literary history of Korea, comparative textual media, and global written culture. His major work-in-progress is “Irresistible Fabulation: Moral Imagination and Storytelling in Korean Confucian Tradition.”
Alejandro Guardado is a 6th year PhD Candidate in the Department of History. His dissertation, “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn (1968-2000),” examines how Indigenous activists developed political networks to bolster self-determination movements in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Leo Raykher is a senior majoring in History. His thesis, titled “Economics, Espionage, and Exile: the Surveilled life of David Drucker, esq.,” examines the life of his great, great uncle David Drucker.
Thora Jordt is a History and Art History major from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her project examines the artist Alexandra Exter’s contributions as a costume and set designer for theatre and film between 1915 and 1925, with a focus on the 1924 film Aelita: Queen of Mars.
Daniel Bell is a rising senior from Chicago, Illinois, double-majoring in Economics and History. His thesis project is centered around Herbert Jenkins, Atlanta’s influential twentieth-century police chief.
Eunjae Thompson is a senior studying Philosophy and Religion with a minor in History. Their honors thesis, titled “Beyond Capture: Blackened Piety & the Politics of Refusal,” will interrogate how the life-writing genre not only illuminates but draws the boundaries of the human condition.
Dr. Adriana Chira, Associate Professor of Atlantic World History, has been named Winship Distinguished Professor of History (effective September 1, 2025). Chira’s research and teaching specializations include: Atlantic history; Cuba in world history; race; slavery and the law; land tenure and property; and post-emancipation. This prestigious appointment recognizes Chira’s scholarly eminence and contributions to Emory’s mission.
Chira’s first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantation (Cambridge University Press, Afro-Latin America Series, 2022), focuses on enslaved and free Afro-descendants’ efforts to own landed property and to attain free legal status through claims to ownership filed inside first instance and appellate courts in Cuba during the nineteenth century. The book traces the political implications of these processes, arguing for a history of emancipation that pays attention to vernacular legalism and modes of claiming property. The project is based on extensive archival research within Cuba (in Havana and Santiago de Cuba) and Spain.
Patchwork Freedoms received the Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic World History from the American Historical Association, the Peter Gonville Stein Prize for best book in non-US legal history from the American Society for Legal History, and the Elsa Goveia Prize for excellence in Caribbean history from the Association of Caribbean Historians. It has also received honorable mentions from the Latin American Studies Association (the Nineteenth Century Section) and from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Section of the Southern Historical Association.
Chira has also authored multiple acclaimed scholarly articles, including:
“Freedom with Local Bonds: Custom and Manumission in the Age of Emancipation,” The American Historical Review 126.3 (September), 949-977
“Ampliando los significados de sevicia: Los reclamos de protección corporal de los esclavos en la Cuba del siglo XIX,” Páginas: Revista Digital de la Escuela de Historia de la Universidad de Rosario (Argentina) no. 33 (Sept./Oct.): https://revistapaginas.unr.edu.ar/index.php/RevPaginas/article/view/546
“Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817-1868,” Law and History Review 36.1 (winter), 1-33.
Chira teaches a range of thematic and placed-based courses, from “Human Trafficking in World History” to “History Lab: Puerto Rico.” She also created an Emory study abroad program in Cuba, which focuses on questions of food sovereignty and environmental history, that usually takes place during the Maymester semester.
Students and faculty on Cuba study abroad trip, 2024
Chira’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by residential fellowships at Yale University (at the Agrarian Studies Center) and at Harvard University (with the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History).
Do’s grandfather, Đỗ Phương Anh, in front of Bách Thảo Market in Nashville, after passing his citizenship test in 2000. Photo courtesy of the Anhhuy Do.
Alumnus Anhhuy Do, a 2024 graduate who completed majors in History and Political Science, has published a powerful article in Southern Spaces. The piece, “Sài Gòn to Nashville: A Refugee Journey,” traces the remarkable and harrowing migration of his family from Vietnam to Nashville, Tennessee, where they resettled in the 1990s as part of the U.S. government’s Humanitarian Operation. Published fifty years after the fall of Sài Gòn and the communist takeover of Laos, Cambodia, and Việt Nam, Do’s piece illuminates the legacies of the post-Việt Nam War era in Southeast Asia and among Vietnamese American communities throughout the U.S.
While at Emory, Do was active in many groups, including Asian Pacific-Islander Desi American Activists, Pi Sigma Alpha, the Vietnamese Student Association, he Atlanta Urban Debate League, Center for Civic and Community Engagement (CCE) Society, and Imagining Democracy Lab. In his senior year, he won the History Department’s Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award and the Jane Yang Award for Community Advocacy from the Office of Campus Life.
Do is pursuing his PhD in Vietnamese History from Princeton University, supported by a Presidential Fellowship. He extends a special thank you to Dr. Allen Tullos, Professor and Co-Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, “for making this publication possible and remaining steadfast in amplifying unheard voices across Southern US history.” Read Do’s piece here: “Sài Gòn to Nashville: A Refugee Journey.”
“Many South Vietnamese sought new identities as they resettled in locations such as California, Texas, Washington State, Louisiana, and the DC metro area including Maryland and northern Virginia. Perhaps surprisingly, Tennessee also became home to generations of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants with intense transnational migration histories. One family’s story is that of my own, whose refugee experience does not follow the typical timeline of helicopter escapees and boat people. Rather, as Humanitarian Operation arrivals, my family’s history offers an illuminating narrative.“
Recent Emory graduate and history major Alex Minovici has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry’s Undergraduate Honors Award for the thesis, “Singe Spaima: The 1989 Revolution and the Politics of Violence in Socialist and Post Socialist Romania.” Minovici, who completed a double major in Philosophy, Politics, and Law, produced the thesis as an Undergraduate Honors Fellow at the Fox Center over the 2025-26 academic year. “Singe Spaima” received Highest Honors from the Emory Department of History.
Minovici offered reflections on the thesis and experience as a fellow at the Fox Center in conversation with Karl-Mary Akre (Fox Center Communications and Outreach Coordinator). Read an excerpt below along with their full conversation.
“…what truly gives Romanian people power in their new democracy is remembering the violence and trauma with the express purpose of holding state officials accountable; refusing to forget abuses. Memory can be an act of resistance. Along these lines, I feel as if my thesis is part of a broader effort to document, remember, and respect the trauma that Romanians experienced in recent history.”
Emory Libraries recently announced the 2025 recipients of the Elizabeth Long Atwood Undergraduate Research Award, which annually recognizes Emory College students who engage with the library’s collections and demonstrate excellence in undergraduate research. Three of the five awardees produced their projects in courses in the history department, taught by Dr. Judith A. Miller and Dr. Jinyu Liu, respectively. They are:
Anushka Basu, class of 2026, a double major in QSS: Data Science and vocal performance, received an Atwood Award for her paper, “Gender in Opera: How Mozart’s Bastien und Bastienne Reflects and Reinforces Enlightenment-Era Roles of Women,” that she completed for “History 412W: Music and Politics” (taught Dr. Judith A. Miller).
Jasper Chen, class of 2028, a classics and computer science major, received an Atwood Award for his paper, “Sardis: A Millennium of Adaptation,” that he completed for “Classics 190/History 190: Freshman Seminar: Ordinary Romans” (taught by Dr. Jinyu Liu).
Agustin Zelikson, class of 2025, double major in philosophy, politics, and law as well as history, received an honorable mention for his paper, “A National Identity Arises: The Political Origins of Aurora,” that he completed for “History 412W: Music and Politics” (taught by Dr. Judith A. Miller).
On April 30 the History Department will gather for the annual Senior Celebration to honor history major, joint major, and minor graduates. Five graduating students will receive senior prizes for their exceptional contributions to undergraduate historical inquiry at Emory. The senior prize recipients are:
James Z. Rabun Prize for the Best Record in American History – Matthea Boon
Named for former professor James Z. Rabun, this prize is awarded annually to the graduating senior history major or joint major in Emory College who has achieved the best overall record in American history courses.
The African, Asian, and Latin American History Prize for Best Record in African, Asian, and Latin American History – Rebecca Casel
Established in 2015, this award is given annually to the graduating senior history major or joint major in Emory College who has achieved the best overall record in African, Asian, and Latin American history courses.
George P. Cuttino Prize for the best record in European History – Ezekiel Jones (Co-recipient)
Established in 1984 to honor Professor George P. Cuttino, this prize is awarded annually to the graduating senior history major or joint major in Emory College who has achieved the most outstanding record in European history courses.
The Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award – Alex Minovici
Established in memory of Matt Carter, who graduated from Emory in May 2000 with High Honors in History, this award is given each year to the graduating history major or joint major in Emory College who exemplifies the qualities that made Matt Carter such an outstanding individual: high academic achievement and good works in the community.
George P. Cuttino Prize for the best record in European History – Samantha Stevens (Co-recipient)
Established in 1984 to honor Professor George P. Cuttino, this prize is awarded annually to the graduating senior history major or joint major in Emory College who has achieved the most outstanding record in European history courses.
