Category / Undergraduate Students

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History Honors Student Becca Frischling Wins James L. Roark Prize in American History

Many congratulations to Emory History Honors student, Becca Frischling, who has won the James L. Roark Prize in American History for summer travel to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, NY. She’s working on politically-oriented theatrical and choral organizations within the early-20th century Yiddish labor movement. Her working title is ”Freedom in Song: Examining the Workmen’s Circle, Choral Music, & Theater within the American Yiddish Labor Movement, 1921-1939.” Prof. Jonathan Prude is her Honors director.

She is especially grateful to Dr. Prude for his guidance. She writes that she has “taken 2 great classes with him.” She has also enjoyed classes with Prof. Eric Goldstein, Prof. Jason Ward, & Prof. Judith Miller.

The award honors James L. Roark, who was the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History and taught at Emory from 1983 to 2016. A first generation college student, Professor Roark embarked on an academic journey that took him from community college to Nigeria with the Peace Corps, to Stanford for his doctorate, and to Emory as one of his generation’s most influential historians of the American South. Professor Roark was, above all, a steward of the Emory community, having mentored hundreds of undergraduate students, advised groundbreaking theses, and served two terms as Department Chair. Prior to his retirement, Professor Roark was known throughout the Emory community as a revered professor, trusted colleague, and beloved mentor. As such, the James L. Roark Prize is not only an invitation to conduct research, but also a charge to honor Professor Roark’s legacy of service to the Emory community. Former students Ben Leiner and Naveed Amalfard led the effort to create this fellowship in 2016.

This fall, all of the winners of our summer funding awards will make presentations on their projects and their summer research experiences to the History Department. We look forward to hearing about Becca’s summer! Many congratulations, again, Becca!

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Loren and Gail Starr Award in Experiential Learning Given to History Major Matthew Croswhite

The Department of History is delighted to award one of the new Loren & Gail Starr Awards in Experiential Learning to Emory History major Matthew Croswhite for the Summer of 2022. He will create a website about the Emory mascot, Dooley, and its possible link to the cadaver trade associated with Emory’s School of Medicine. He’s exploring the broader context of the possible racist practices by the school that influenced the creation of Dooley. His tentative title is “Skeletons in the Closet: Emory University’s Position in the Illicit Cadaver Trade and the History of Dooley the Skeleton.”

He explains that, “My directed study with Dr. [Matthew] Payne has been the most impactful on my experience as a history major and in developing my understanding of the field of history. The 398R Research Tutorial I took with Dr. Payne last spring particularly has been a great boon in the development of this project, for the focus of this research was also Dooley.”

Established in 2022 through a generous donation, the Loren and Gail Starr Award provides summer funding for experiential learning projects proposed by History majors, joint majors, or minors​. The Starr Award is intended to support students who wish to use the knowledge and skills they have acquired in history courses to create or participate in projects in settings outside of the classroom. Bold, creative, and off-the-beaten path proposals are encouraged. The only rule is that engagement with the past be central to the experience undertaken by the student. We will offer a second round of these awards in the fall.

We look forward to seeing Matt’s website at the end of the summer! This fall, all of the winners of our summer funding awards will make presentations on their projects and their research experiences to the History Department. Many congratulations, again, Matt!

Some of you might know that Matt’s mother, Prof. Annette Finley-Croswhite, earned her doctorate in French History at Emory. We were so happy when Matt chose to come to Emory and then to Major in History!

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History Honors Student Gabriele K. Kim Wins the Theodore H. Jack Award

Congratulations to Emory History Honors student Gabriele K. Kim, who has won the Theodore H. Jack Award for the Summer of 2022. Gabriele will travel to the Virginia Davis Laskey Library Archives in Nashville, TN, to conduct research on her project, “Transpacific Encounters: Southern Methodist Women and the Chinese Missionary Enterprise (1880-1920).” 

She is very grateful for the support of Prof. Chris Suh, her thesis director, throughout her entire college career. She was able to work on her first research project with him last year through SIRE program (2020-2021). She took “HIST 285: Asian American History” in her first year and most recently took “HIST 488: Transpacific Life.” She writes that she “really loved talking ‘HIST 385: American Conservatisms’ with Dr. Joseph Crespino, and Dr. Kate Rosenblatt’s ‘Religion & the Constitution’ course. Still, picking one favorite professor or classes is too hard because they are all so wonderful!”

The Department of History is able to award these funds because Mrs. Mary Spencer Jack Craddock (’33C) made a contribution to Emory in honor of her father, Theodore Henley Jack, in 1992.  Prof. Jack was an historian and early Emory history faculty member. In 1916 he was selected to head the Department of History of the new Emory College. He became Dean of the Graduate School in 1919, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts in 1920, and Vice-president of Emory University in 1929. Mrs. Craddock’s gift honors her father’s commitment to Emory and to historical scholarship.

This fall, all of the winners of our summer funding awards will make presentations on their projects and their summer research experiences to the History Department. We look forward to hearing about Gabi’s summer! Many congratulations, again, Gabi!

https://www.facebook.com/HistoryAtEmory/posts/460728405848011
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History Major Bronwen Boyd Named 2022 Graduating Woman of Excellence

Congratulations to History major Bronwen Boyd on being named a 2022 Graduating Woman of Excellence by the Center for Women at Emory. Each year the Center invites the community to identify graduating women who have demonstrated great effort, strength of character, and excellence in their time at Emory. Boyd was among 50 outstanding graduates from across Emory’s college, graduate, and professional school divisions honored at a pinning ceremony on March 24.

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Six History Honors Students Present at Fox Center’s Undergraduate Honors Colloquium

Six History Honors students will present at the upcoming Undergraduate Honors Colloquium, convened by the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. The History majors featured and the titles of their talks are:

  • Scott Benigno: “Depicting Zulu: Race, Empire, and Zulu Representations in the British Metropole, 1820s-1910”
  • Bronwen Boyd: “Ceci n’est pas une signare: Locating Women in Nineteenth-Century Urban Coastal Senegal: Using French Representations of the Signares”
  • Hannah Charak: “Terror from the Top Down: Violence and Voter Suppression in the Postwar South”
  • Willie Lieberman: “The Mystery of England’s First Great Opera: Nahum Tate, Dido, and Womanhood”
  • Julien Nathan: “Who is the Nation: Democratization of Leftist Media in West Berlin”
  • Matthew Takavarasha: “Apostates of the Rechtsstaat: Jurisprudence between Weimar Democracy and Nazi
    Dictatorship”

The event will take place on Wednesday, April 6th, 2022, from 4-6pm EST in Ackerman Hall on the 3rd floor of the Carlos Museum.

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Undergraduate Majors Russell and Walker Among Recipients of Robert T. Jones Scholarships

Congratulations to history majors Channelle Russell and Bryn Walker on receiving Emory’s prestigious Robert T. Jones scholarship. In 2022 four graduating seniors were selected for the scholarship, which supports one year of postgraduate study at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Read the Emory News Center’s short biographical profiles of Russell and Walker below, and check out the other recipients of the awards here.

Channelle Russell

An English and history joint major, with a minor in anthropology, Russell has a deep interest in storytelling.

“From a young age, I have been interested in storytelling as a way to explore and interrogate the world,” Russell says.

Finding her major fields as a sophomore, she pursued a course of study devoted to issues of power, race and gender through scholar-writers such as Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison, among others. “Like me, they are all Black women with a story to share,” Russell says.

A first-generation college student who resides in Atlanta, she plans to undertake a master’s degree in creative writing in prose at the University of St Andrews. Her academic interests were born from “the silences and gaps of the literary canon,” as she sought “the ghosts of Black women.” Her work as an undergraduate allowed her to negotiate herself into the narratives that she wanted to read, and subsequently into the narratives that she wants to create, hallmarks that can be seen through her work as an arts and entertainment writer with the Emory Wheel and as the editor-in-chief of Blackstar* Magazine. 

Awarded a Woodruff Dean’s Achievement Scholarship at the end of her first year, she was described by a recommender as having “an expansive intellect, keen wit, compassion, poise and thoughtful perspectives on various issues in the world.” She is currently a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, and her honors thesis investigates gender, sound and slavery in textual representation of Jamaican women.

Bryn Walker

A graduate of Emory’s Oxford College, Walker was described by one of her recommenders as a “delightful person who brings humility, good humor and a mature point of view to all that she undertakes.” A history major who was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 2021, Walker’s research interests relate to the American South, cultural and social movements, public history and historical memory.

She was drawn to undertake a master’s degree in museum and heritage studies because of an interest in the “parallels between memory in the U.S. South, which was part of my undergraduate research focus, and Scottish historical memory. Methodologically, the U.K. has a much more robust tradition of public history and I’d like to expand the possibilities for public history scholarship in the United States.”

A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, the first-generation college student’s time at Emory has been marked by a dedication to service. Currently a research ambassador for Emory College’s Undergraduate Research Program, Walker has also spent time on both the Oxford College and Emory College Honor Councils, helped new students acclimate to Emory as a two-time orientation leader and was a diversity ambassador for Oxford College’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

Issues of diversity have played a significant role in Walker’s research experiences to date, including work on country-level migration policy responses to COVID-19, and a 10-week research fellowship studying Confederate monuments in Georgia and tracing the Georgia United Daughters of the Confederacy’s relationship to state government officials.

Beyond Emory, her public history focus has resulted in two internship experiences, one as an interpretive intern with the National Parks Service at Mount Rushmore National Park and the other with the Teaching with Primary Sources Program at the Library of Congress.

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Strocchia and Kelly Publish Co-Authored Article in ‘Renaissance Studies’

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History and Department Chair and her former honors student Ryan Kelly published a co-authored article titled “Picturing the Pox in Italian Popular Prints, 1550-1650” in the flagship British journal Renaissance Studies in March. The article drew on material from Kelly’s honors thesis, which received highest honors in May 2021. Read the article abstract below along with the full piece here.

“The disease commonly known as the ‘pox’ or the ‘French Disease’ ravaged the European continent following its initial appearance circa 1495. Its devastating physical effects and sensory assaults, ranging from stinking sores to baldness and collapsed noses, invited both a social and medical evaluation of what was quickly recognized to be a sexually transmitted disease. Despite the prevalence and visibility of the pox in sixteenth-century Europe, its visual language has not been studied in much depth. This essay examines how cheap narrative prints issued between 1550 and 1650 helped construct the iconography of pox and disseminate medical information about it in late Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a group of best-selling Venetian and Roman prints, the essay argues that multimedial picture stories combining text and image provided one of the many sources of vernacular information by which Italians learned to read the body. In recounting stories of diseased prostitutes and their clients in vivid detail, these prints expanded vernacular health literacy and provided a ready-made language of disease. The prints analysed here enjoyed enormous social reach as components of a new health-promoting, communicative object – the hand-held paper fan – whose popularity cemented visual and epistemic connections between pox and prostitution.“

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History Major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo Earns Awards and Support for Filmmaking

Congratulations to undergraduate history major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo, who was recently awarded the Women in Film and Television Atlanta (WIFTA) 2021 Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded to “deserving female students based on their academic standing, artistic talents and commitment to a curriculum.” Kheyal’s film “My Bunny’s Story,” co-created with Isaac Gazmararian, won ten awards, including three Gold Tripod awards, in the 2021 Nationwide Campus Movie Fest.

https://twitter.com/PamelaScully/status/1495094408747925520
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Major Bryn Walker (20Ox and 22C) Featured Among Emory’s ‘Best and Brightest’

Emory Magazine recently featured undergraduate senior history major Bryn Walker in a profile of 16 flourishing students across all schools and levels at the university. The feature highlights Walker’s numerous academic accolades – including the John and Ouida Temple Scholarship, Oxford College American History Award, the Woodruff Dean’s Achievement Scholarship, and a prestigious Library of Congress internship – along with her active support for fellow members of the Emory community throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Read more about Walker and 15 other thriving Emory students: “With a Flourish.”

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Daniel LaChance Named 2022-23 Chronos Fellow

Congratulations to Dr. Daniel LaChance on receiving the 2022-23 Chronos Faculty Fellowship in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. LaChance, the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History, 2020-23, and Associate Professor of History, is the third recipient of the award. A year of paid leave and research stipend will support the completion of LaChance’s next book, Empathy for the Devil: Executions in the American Imagination. Undergraduate students will work alongside LaChance as research assistants on this project. Read more about the fellowship and Empathy for the Devil here: “Emory historian Daniel LaChance named 2022-23 Chronos Fellow.”