Congratulations to Dr. Tonio Andrade, Professor of History, on receiving an NEH Public Scholars Fellowship. Awarded for his project “The Dutch East India Company: A Global History,” the fellowship will support the writing of a book about the factors that enabled the Dutch East India Company to become the dominant maritime power in Asia: its financing, its military strength, and its use of trade and information networks. This NEH program supports projects that lead to the “creation and publication of well-researched nonfiction books in the humanities written for the broad public.”
In the summer of 2023, Dr. Ellie R. Schainker, Arthur Blank Family Foundation Associate Professor of Modern European Jewish History, led an inaugural study abroad trip to Poland. Schainker taught the course “Jews of Poland: History and Memory” in collaboration with doctoral student Olivia Cocking to sixteen Emory undergraduates. The ten-day, one-credit program was supported by the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, which provided significant subsidies for undergraduate participants through the Berger Family Fund. One of the undergraduate participants, Emory College 2023 graduate Sasha Rivers, reflected on the experience for the TIJS. Read her post here: “Journey to Poland: A Student’s Perspective.”
Abiodun Ademiluwa (left) and Beverly Val-Addo (right)
The Emory History Department welcomes the incoming graduate cohort for the fall semester of 2023, comprised of doctoral students Abiodun Ademiluwa and Beverly Val-Addo. A native of Nigeria, Ademiluwa received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classics from the University of Ibadan and a master’s in history from Northern Illinois University. Her research centers on Afro-European encounters, especially the intersections of power relations, gender, and violence between Europeans and Yoruba women in the Atlantic World. Val-Addo received her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Maryland – College Park. Her work examines the history of the African diaspora in West Africa, with a focus on the intersections of ethnicity, gender, and migration in a pre-early colonial context. Ademiluwa and Val-Addo will both work under the advisement of Dr. Mariana P. Candido, Winship Distinguished Research Professor of History, 2023-2026 and Professor, and Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor of History.
Dr. William S. Cossen, a former history major and 2008 graduate, recently published his first monograph. Titled Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Cornell UP), the book examines how white American Catholics worked to claim privileged and leading roles as model American citizens in the decades after the Civil War and before the Great Depression. Describing the book as “Superb,” Mark Noll (The University of Notre Dame) praises the book’s combination of “exceptionally deep archival research with wide reading in contemporary and historical accounts.” Gossen completed his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University in 2016. He is faculty at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology, the top-ranked public high school in Georgia and U.S. News & World Report’s ninth-best high school in the United States.
Dr. Brian Vick, Professor of History, was recently quoted in article about a socialist utopian project pursued by German immigrants in nineteenth-century Texas. Published in The Texas Observer, the article chronicles the rise and quick demise of the endeavor through the story of the original settlers in the 1840s as well as their descendants in the present. Vick, a specialist in Modern Germany and Central Europe in the long nineteenth century, describes how revolutionary ideas popular at German universities in this decade would have influenced the German-speaking settlers in Texas. Vick’s latest major publication is Securing Europe after Napoleon: 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which he co-edited with Beatrice de Graaf (Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands) and Ido de Haan (Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands). Read an excerpt from The Texas Observer piece below along with the full article here: “The Hill Country’s Lost Utopia.”
“Instead of spending time drinking, playing football, and hazing, like today’s fraternity brothers, the Fortyers spent time drinking, saber-dueling, and discussing politics and philosophy. According to Brian Vick, professor of 19th-century German history at Emory University, those universities were a hotbed of revolutionary ideas at a time when the educated professional class was calling for an end to absolutist monarchies, prompting the “springtime of revolutions” across central Europe in 1848. This movement included liberal constitutional monarchists, radical republicans, and socialists. The Fortyers were the furthest left, demanding German unification and sovereignty from the Prussian and Hapsburg empires, along with a constitution and social and economic equality.“
At the Emory College of Arts and Sciences Staff Service Awards ceremony on Aug. 17, 2023, Becky Herring, Sr. Academic Department Administrator, and Allison Rollins, Sr. Accountant, were honored as milestone achievers for their length of service: 25 years for Allison and 30 years for Becky. The ceremony was hosted by new ECAS Dean Barbara Krauthamer. Congratulations and thank you to our exceptional department staff!
“Socolow, center right, with a bandanna in her hair. The other people are Paraguayan campesinos who were working on clearing an overgrown farm-to-market road, and (grouped around her) students from the Universidad Catolica Nuestra Senora de la Asuncion. The students were helping the campesinos and also providing medical services. Susan was invited to join them and write an article about their work. Source: Photo provided by author.” Photo and caption from “Life, Luck, and How I Became a Historian,” The Americas 70:1 (July 2013), pp. 1-8.
The Department of History mourns the death of Dr. Susan Midgen Socolow, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emerita of History and a faculty member at Emory from 1977 to 2011. Socolow passed away at her home in Atlanta with her husband Daniel on July 21, 2023, “before Alzheimer’s could rob her of her identity and raison d’etre,” as noted in her obituary in TheNew York Times. Below, History Department faculty and two doctoral students advised by Professor Socolow reflect on her towering career as a historian and mentor.
Professor Socolow had an unusually distinguished career full of important contributions both to Emory and to the field of Latin American Studies. Professor Socolow began her career at Emory in September 1977 after receiving her PhD in Latin American history from Columbia University. Her first book, a study of the merchants of Buenos Aires, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1978, and she followed this with a second monograph, published by Duke University, nine years later. She also edited two collections of essays dealing with broad themes in Latin American history. Professor Socolow wasn’t the first historian of Latin America at Emory, but she did as much as anyone in constructing the undergraduate curriculum in Latin American history and founding what has become an enormously successful Latin American history PhD program.
Over the course of her career Professor Socolow received three Fulbright Fellowships, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Social Science Research Council Fellowship, and a Tinker Foundation Fellowship. She served on the Executive Committee of the Conference on Latin American History, the leading professional organization in her field, from 1997 to 2003 and as Vice-President of the American Historical Association from 1989 to 1993. In 2005, Professor Socolow was inducted into the Argentine Academy of History. In 2007, the Rocky Mountain Conference of Latin American Studies honored her with the Edward Lieuwen Award for Excellence in Teaching Latin American history.
A Remembrance by Former Students Viviana Grieco (Ph.D., ’05) and Fabrício Prado (Ph.D., ’09)
Susan Socolow was a pioneering historian of Latin America. Her research examined the countries of the Southern Cone of the South American continent at a time when most U.S.-based scholars focused almost exclusively on Mexico and Central America. Trained at Columbia University, Socolow helped advance the growth of history as a doctoral discipline, emphasizing methodological innovation, evidence-based scholarship, as well as clear and elegant prose. Susan easily bridged academic communities, not only because of her ability to speak multiple languages, but also because she fostered international connections and created opportunities for scholars and students from different parts of the world. Susan’s first book, The Merchants of Viceregal Buenos Aires (1978) was a pathbreaking monograph that turned the economic and social history of colonial Rio de la Plata (especially Argentina and Uruguay) upside down. In countries where the historiography had emphasized the power and wealth of landowners as the ruling elites, Susan’s work demonstrated that the merchant elites controlled most of the wealth, credit networks, and social and political capital during the late colonial period. Such an interpretation, based on intensive research in local archives (and combining administrative, private, and ecclesiastical sources), opened new avenues of research in Argentina and Uruguay, other countries of Spanish America, and Brazil.
A decade later, Susan published The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769 -1810 (1987) which provided a carefully researched social history of the officers appointed to this area during the Bourbon Reforms. These works established Susan’s reputation as a leader in the field not only in the United States but also in Latin America and Europe. Beyond her initial and foundational contributions to the field of Rio de la Plata studies, Susan’s works incorporated early on the history of women and family as integral parts of society and put forward innovative demographic and quantitative approaches. Her studies contended with themes such as marrying strategies, migration, sexuality, and health. Additionally, her scholarly production helped demystify the pervasive dichotomy between cities and the countryside that had dominated historiography. Susan also pioneered adopting digital techniques applied to history, from utilizing large databases to GIS.
Susan Socolow’s passion for the history of Latin America is attested by her incredible publishing record and her tireless support for academic organizations. Susan published one of the most widely read works about the history of women in Latin America (Women of Colonial Latin America, 2000, 2014), three edited volumes, and 35 articles in top journals in the field. Her extensive scholarly and service accomplishments have been noted by numerous institutions and organizations, which have granted her many awards. In 2007, the Academia Nacional de la Historia in Argentina made Susan its first female foreign member. Susan was a relentless supporter of CLAH, RMCLAS, the Tepaske Seminar, and a founder of the Rio de la Plata Workshop, which she established alongside her students and is currently in its 15th edition.
Beyond her academic production, Susan Socolow’s commitment to her students, who successfully graduated and found employment in a highly competitive job market, was extraordinary. She staunchly supported her mentees and their ideas and encouraged us not to be afraid to leave our marks in the field. She constantly reminded us that, as scholars, we had the independence and autonomy to innovate, yet she also emphasized that only rigorous scholarship would enable us to challenge paradigms. As a mentor, Susan taught us the importance of advancing our careers alongside the need to care for our families and loved ones. She taught us to be collegial and supportive of our students and peers and to build communities around them. Susan’s passing invites us to reflect on her influential career and accomplishments. Despite this enormous loss, we are proud to continue her legacy, not only as historians of the Rio de la Plata and South America, but also as friends and colleagues whose lives she enriched.
Dr. Viviana Grieco is Professor of History at The University of Missouri – Kansas City. Dr. Fabrício Prado is Associate Professor of History at The College of William and Mary.
Doctoral student Anjuli Webster has been awarded a 2023 Dissertation Grant from the National Institute of Social Sciences (NISS) to support fieldwork for her dissertation, titled “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in Southern Africa, 1750-1900.” Webster is currently conducting research in South Africa, Eswatini, and Mozambique. The NISS funding will support additional research in Mozambique central to two chapters of her dissertation. Read a quote from Webster about her work below, along with an illuminating feature story about Webster written by Karina Antenucci for the Laney Graduate School.
“Understanding the afterlives of empire is a central concern of my work as a historian. Histories of imperialism and colonialism have not only shaped our present climate crisis, but they have also undermined indigenous modes of responding to and managing ecological emergency across the world.”
Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Associate Professor, was recently recognized for an article the she published in Past & Present with her co-author, Dr. Susan McDonough, Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Titled “Singlewomen in the Late Medieval Mediterranean,” their piece won the article of the month prize from the Mediterranean Seminar. The article challenges prevailing ideas about the supposed distinct marital patterns among mediaeval women in Northern and Southern Europe, offering a persuasive, archivally-rich reinterpretation that the prize evaluator described as “rigorous and thought-provoking” as well as “theoretically sophisticated.” Read the abstract from the article below, along with the full comments from the award evaluation.
This article challenges a long-entrenched model of two discrete marital regimes in northern and southern Europe. Demographer John Hajnal argued in 1965 that a distinctive north-western European Marriage Pattern emerged post-1700 when a large population of unmarried men and women married in their early to late twenties and formed their own household rather than join a multi-generational household. The corollary to this argument is that women in southern Europe married young and universally, and thus rarely entered into domestic service. Medievalists have embraced and repeated this paradigm, shaping assumptions about the Mediterranean as less developed or ‘less European’ than the north and ignoring the experience of women enslaved throughout the region.
Notaries and judicial officials in medieval Barcelona, Valencia, Mallorca, Marseille, Palermo, Venice, Famagusta and Crete recognized singlewomen owning property, buying, selling and manumitting enslaved people, appointing procurators, committing crimes and making wills. We reintegrate the experiences of singlewomen, both enslaved and free, into the daily life of the medieval Mediterranean. Understanding how these women made community, survived economically and participated in the legal and notarial cultures of their cities reframes our understanding of women’s options outside marriage in the medieval past.
