Category / Undergraduate Students

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History Major Ellie Coe Receives 2020 ECLC Excellence in Language Studies Award in Russian

Congratulations to history major Ellie Coe, the recipient of the 2020 ECLC Excellence in Language Studies Award in Russian. Last year, Coe received a Clio Prize for Best Research Paper in a Freshman Seminar for her work, “A Mythic Spaceman: The Cultural Influence of Yuri Gagarin.” Below, the Emory College Language Center offers details on Coe’s work and the award:

Coe is a second-year studying History and Russian & East European Studies. She first began learning Russian in high school under the tutelage of a private teacher, and immediately fell in love with the language and culture. Through her Russian language classes at Emory, Ellie has discovered a passion for Russian poetry of the early 20th century; her favorite Russian writer is Vladimir Mayakovsky. Specializing in Soviet history, Ellie is interested in studying the Soviet space program, which launched the first man into space in 1961. In October 2019, she was able to put her Russian skills to use when she interviewed five cosmonauts at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for an independent research project. Ellie is grateful to her professors Dr. Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Dr. Juliette Stapanian-Apkarian, and Dr. Matthew Payne for encouraging her to follow her passion!

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Undergraduate Senior Prizes for 2019-20

The Emory History Department Undergraduate Committee is pleased to announce the recipients of the History Department’s Undergraduate Senior Prizes for 2019-2020:

George P. Cuttino Prize for the Best Record in European History: Hannah Mariska Fuller

James Z. Rabun Prize for the Best Record in American History: Isaiah Simon Sirois

The Latin America & Non-Western World Prize for Best Record in Latin America & Non-Western World History: Kate Elizabeth Sandlin

Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award: Yazmina Adi Sarieh

These awards will be presented at the Senior Celebration on Wednesday, April 29, 2:00 – 3:30 pm via Zoom (details to follow). Read more about each of these prizes, including previous years’ winners, at Senior Prizes.

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History Major and Fox Fellow Drew Bryant (20C) Discusses Research on International Activist Movement

Senior history major Drew Bryant is a 2019-20 Fox Center Humanities Honors Fellow. Bryant recently contributed a blog post on the Fox Center for the Humanities website about her honors project on the international activist movement in the 1990s. That movement sought to utilize the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a vehicle towards protecting women’s human rights. Read an excerpt from her post below, along with the full piece: “International Activism and the Women’s Human Rights Movement: 1990-2000.”

My project explores how activists emphasized the overarching problem of violence against women, which served as an issue which could unite women around a global women’s human rights agenda despite the varying interests of women transnationally. Moreover, activist awareness-building regarding the issue of violence against women served as a platform upon which other issues facing women could be introduced into the human rights framework, such as those related to reproductive freedom.

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Strocchia’s FYS, ‘Epidemics in History,’ Brings Historical Insights to Unfolding Pandemic

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, is teaching a first-year seminar titled “Epidemics in History” this spring. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the course far more timely than she or the students anticipated. The Emory News Center featured “Epidemics in History” among Emory courses where professors and students are using the pandemic as a learning opportunity. Read about all of those courses in their article, “COVID-19 in Class.” Strocchia also offered comments on her original idea for the class and how she modified it in order to investigate this historical moment in real time. Read her comments below.

My freshman seminar this semester, “Epidemics in History,” was not designed to coincide with a global pandemic. I did plan to end the course with a study of the 1918 influenza epidemic after examining the Black Death and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks. Our goal was to explore the historical and biological effects of urbanization, environmental change, and the human connectivity resulting from faster modes of transportation. But I also wanted to raise issues of preparedness with my students, many of who planned careers in medicine and science. It seemed oddly serendipitous that the Wuhan outbreak of coronavirus hit the headlines just as spring semester started. At our first class meeting in January, we decided that tracking its progression would make a good class project. Relying on trusted news outlets, we learned the value of social distancing, good hand hygiene, and flattening the curve. Week by week, the news grew more startling but still seemed far from home. By the time spring break arrived, though, COVID-19 already had an official name and the world was on the verge of pandemic. We’ve since modified our syllabus to make direct comparisons between the experiences of 1918 and our own day, looking at public health policies, frontline healers, issues of fear and resilience. It’s been a rewarding but sobering experience—one that shows there’s much to be learned about health and society from studying the past.

– Sharon Strocchia

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Four History Majors Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa

Congratulations to the four history majors inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society this spring. They are Melanie Dunn, Cameron Katz, Yaza Sarieh, and Jesse Steinman. Sarieh and Steinman are seniors; Dunn and Katz are both juniors. The Gamma Chapter of Georgia was established at Emory University on April 5th, 1929, by the authority of the Sixteenth National Council of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. The initiation ceremony, originally slated for the first week of April 2020, has been postponed to the fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Channelle Russell Receives Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship

Congratulations to Channelle Russell on winning a Mellon Mays Undergraduate fellowship. Russell is a sophomore with a joint major in History and English, concentrating in African Atlantic history and literature, with a minor in Anthropology. Her Mellon Mays research project is tentatively titled “Unspooling Venus: Intimacy, Space, and Memory in 1700s Brazil” and explores the life of 18th-century enslaved woman Xica da Silva, whose historical enslavement became a cultural monument in contemporary Brazilian media. Russell’s interest in the Atlantic stems largely from a Fall 2018 freshman seminar she took with Dr. Adriana Chira, “Radicals and Revolution in the Caribbean.” Her interest in archival work took root in Dr. Maria Montalvo’s current “North American Slave Revolts” course. Beyond being a College undergrad, Russell is interested in knowledge production and media and plans to further explore the intersections of narrative formation and history in graduate school.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program works to increase the number of underrepresented minority students pursuing doctoral degrees in the arts and sciences and, in doing so, to create more diverse faculties on university campuses in the United States and South Africa. Emory has had comprehensive participation in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program for more than 17 years. Read more about the fellowship here.

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Daniel Thomas (20C), History Major and Fox Center Honors Fellow, Writes About Separatism in Eastern Ukraine

Daniel Thomas, a senior double major in history and international studies, recently wrote a piece about his research on separatism in Eastern Ukraine for the blog of the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory. Thomas is a 2019-’20 Fox Center Humanities Honors Fellow, completing his honors thesis with a regional focus on the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. The thesis draws on archival research and interviews that Thomas conducted in Kyiv in 2019. Associate Professor Matthew Payne is Thomas’ adviser. Read an excerpt from the post on the Fox Center’s blog below along with the full piece: “Neighbors against Neighbors: A historical study of separatist groups and rhetoric in Eastern Ukraine.”

The Fox Center’s generous grant has afforded me both the privilege of working in a tightly-knit epistemic community and the ability to conduct further research into my topic. The lump sum that I received as a part of my fellowship helped fund my interview-collecting over the Winter Break in Kyiv. Hearing the lived experiences of the Donbas’ denizens contributed a great deal to this project. I spoke with refugees and former separatist affiliates who dealt first-hand with the destructive repercussions of Donbasian separatism. Their accounts and lives illustrated that identity is more of a practice in subjectivity than it is an objective truth. Although my interviewees admitted that the separatist cause was rooted in a real problem (the callousness many politicians, both in Eastern and Western Ukraine, had towards the poor), they also admit that the separatists’ cause did little to ameliorate the Donbas’ desperate situation. Instead, it amplified it, displacing millions upon millions of Donbasians from their homeland. Without their insight, this thesis would have been at best a clueless meditation on a “forgotten” conflict…

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Emory History Department Updates in the Context of COVID-19

Emory University will extend spring break until March 22, after which the institution will transition to remote learning for graduate and undergraduate classes. Visit Emory’s COVID-19 page for details about these changes, and please contact History Department faculty and staff via email with individual questions or concerns. History Department staff and faculty will work remotely for the next several weeks.

All History Department seminars, workshops, and book events have been canceled for the remainder of the semester, including the History Department Workshop scheduled for this Friday, March 20, featuring Dr. Thomas D. Rogers and Dr. Jeffrey T. Manuel, and the celebration of Dr. Sharon Strocchia’s recently-published monograph, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, slated for next week. In lieu of the in-person events featuring these works, check out two recent posts about them:

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History Major Emily Sharp To Present Honors Thesis at Hopkins’ Inaugural Undergraduate Research Symposium

Undergraduate student Emily Sharp, who is a double major in history and English, will present her history honors thesis at the inaugural Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium at Johns Hopkins University in April. Her thesis is titled, “Roy Cohn’s America: Conservatism, Sexual Politics, and Memory in 21st Century America.”