Scott Gavorsky, Ph.D. 2009, has been teaching at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He has an article forthcoming, “L’État comme propriétaire?: Schools as Property in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, eds. Kate Griffiths and David Evans (Rodopi, 2011). He has presented papers at recent Society for French Historical Studies conferences in Arizona and Charleston. In addition to teaching at Anchorage, he organized the Phi Alpha Theta Second Annual Alaska State Conference in February 2011.  The Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, Alaska has an annual fundraiser, an Indoor Mini-Golf Tournament. A number of the history faculty put together a team and participated in the tournament in March 2011. There was also a contest for “best golfing attire,” which they won with their “EiderDons” theme.

Jeremy Pool, Ph.D. 2009, writes that he was thrilled to take part in the Commencement Ceremony last spring. He and his wife are currently living in Minneapolis, while he works at the Minnesota History Center Museum and she works at the University of Minnesota Law Library. He was recently awarded a two-year Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship through the Associated Colleges of the Midwest to serve as an instructor at Monmouth College in Illinois, so they will be moving there in the fall.  At Monmouth, he will be teaching three courses a year in African and Atlantic World history, serving as a resource for students and faculty and further developing his own scholarship. He has submitted an article on education and nation building, currently under review for a special issue of Ghana Studies on Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in Ghana. Now he is working on a second article on the 1948 Cape Coast school strikes, and beginning the long process of transforming his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Christina Welsch, B.A. 2010, has received the Adolph G. Rosengarten Jr. fellowship at Princeton University, where she is pursuing a doctorate. The fellowship is awarded every year for outstanding graduate work in history.  In 2011, she will participate in the Summer Language Program run by the American Institute of Indian Studies.  She will work on Mughal Persian in Lucknow, India.  While a student at Emory, she held a George P. Cuttino Scholarship, which gave her the chance to do research in the India Office Records in both the National Archives of New Delhi and in the British Library in London.  A Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship allowed her to make a short trip to Kolkata, where she could investigate sites related to her research. As a participant in the SIRE Program at Emory, she worked as a research assistant to Professor Tonio Andrade, which deepened her interest in historical scholarship.  Listen to her discuss her love of history and plans for a career as an historian.

Ethan Schiff, B.A. 2008, writes, “After graduating from Emory, I moved to London, UK for a year where I worked as a videographer. I shot videos for many different companies and organizations all around England and even a few in mainland Europe. I met some amazing people and went to many small towns in England that I, otherwise, never would have visited. When I returned to the United States, I worked on some film and commercial sets as a production assistant, but I quickly decided that was not the professional route for me. I am now based in Toronto, where I am continuing my work as a videographer and documentary filmmaker.” He recently made a short documentary called A Silver Lining about his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, which has been accepted as a finalist for the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre Spirit of Hope Video Contest. The film will be shown at the Centre’s gala on May 31st to attendees including Alan Dershowitz, Bob Woodward, David Gergen, and Robert Gibbs. He is now working on another documentary about his grandmother. Ethan explains, “In this documentary, Vera Schiff, a Holocaust survivor, returns to the concentration camp where she was held to explain how she fell in love during the devastating time. Though she has many stories of pain and tragedy, this film focuses on the few moments of relative ease and happiness that Vera felt amidst the tragic deaths of her grandmother, sister, father, and mother. The film explores to what extent happiness can be considered a relative term and how it can be found in the darkest of times.”  He is raising funds for the documentary through the Kickstarter program. You can see a video and learn more about the film, and perhaps give Ethan a donation, on the  Kickstarter Terezin website.

David Abraham, B.A. 2008, is completing a thesis that examined the evolving interpretations and interpretive devices used by historians to understand the eighteenth-century counterrevolutionary writer Edmund Burke. He had received a Robert T Jones Fellowship to study philosophy in St. Andrews, where he wrote a thesis on Plato’s notion of piety. He will graduate with an MPhil in the summer of 2011.

 

Rebecca Shumway, Ph.D. 2004, is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of Africa and the African Diaspora.  She is the author of The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (University of Rochester Press, 2011).  She is also an avid Pittsburgh Steelers fan.

Peter Clericuzio, M.A./B.A. History; Honors, Art History, 2005, is finishing his dissertation, “Nancy as a Center of Art Nouveau Architecture, 1895-1914,” in May, and teaching the survey of western art in the Department of the History of Art at Penn this semester. He also is currently working as an editorial assistant for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. His article, “Modernity, Regionalism, and Art Nouveau at the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, 1909,” will appear in the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide in the spring of 2011. His essay “Le Corbusier and the Reconstruction of Saint-Dié: The Debate over Modernism in France, 1944-46,” based on research undertaken on his Cuttino scholarship at Emory, was published in the Chicago Art Journal in 2010.

Annette Finley-Croswhite, Ph.D. 1991, and Gayle Brunelle, Ph.D. 1988, who did their dissertations with Professor J. Russell Major, have had enormous success with a book they wrote together, Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Louisiana State Press, 2010).  It sold out of its first press run in four weeks and has garnered wonderful reviews.  British historian and journalist, Nigel Jones, picked Murder in the Metro as his favorite book of 2010 for the British magazine History Today and on December 17, they got a wonderful review in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement. Professor Finley-Croswhite writes, “While we remain early modernists based on our training at Emory and other research projects, we have become fascinated by France in the modern era.  Certainly it is testimony to the driving force of Russell Major who always wanted us to think broadly and work in multiple archives that allowed us to broaden ourselves and take on France in the twentieth century.  Our personal friendship has grown deeper as we have learned to write together in one authorial voice.”  The reviews praise the book’s writing, saying that it “reads like a novel.” It is selling very well and being used not just in courses on fascism and modern Europe but also in historical methods classes. A movie might even be in the works!  The co-authors also have been invited to numerous speaking engagements because the book is getting such great buzz. They have a website: www.murderinthemetro.com and are on YouTube and Facebook. Laetitia Toureaux even has her own Facebook site!

Natalia Starostina, Ph.D. 2007, is an Assistant Professor of History at Young Harris College, Georgia. She completed her Ph.D. at Emory University in the summer of 2007 in modern French history (Advisor: Professor Kathryn Amdur). Natalia grew up in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, and was very excited to bring students from Young Harris College to Russia. In May 2010, 19 people visited Moscow and Saint Petersburg. One of the memorable events of the trip was an encounter with a veteran of the Second World War, Mr. Lysov, who arrived to Moscow to take part in the celebration of the 65-anniversary of the victory of the Allies in the Second World War. Perhaps the happiest and most remarkable day of their voyage was the visit to Peterhof, the Russian capital of fountains. In 1717, Peter the Great visited Versailles, the great project of Louis XIV, and built his own Versailles.

Mack P. Holt, Ph.D. 1982, is Professor of History at George Mason University.  Having just finished his long-term project on the Reformation and Wars of Religion in Burgundy, he is starting a new project on “Reading the Bible in Reformation France.” He is on sabbatical this semester—Spring 2011—and will be spending much of the time in Paris looking at several hundred sixteenth-century Bibles. He explains that, “My goal is to find out how lay Protestants and Catholics read their bibles, if there were confessional differences in their readings, what passages they read most, etc. I am especially interested in any readers’ marks such as underlining, marginalia, etc. that might provide clues as to how they interpreted what they read. Having been an archive rat for my entire career, I am now fully immersed in material culture and now use books as material objects rather than just texts.” He was also elected president of the Society for Reformation Research for 2010-2011.