William S. Cossen, B.A. in History and Political Science, 2008, is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in history at The Pennsylvania State University. He is focusing on twentieth-century American religious history.

Jim Crooks, B.A. 1998, History, and High Honors in Physics, went on to get a Ph.D. in physics from UNC Chapel Hill, but switched gears and now has a position at the Environmental Protection Agency, in the Office of Research and Development. He will be part of a biostatistics core facility that provides internal consulting for other agency scientists.  He writes, “Most of what I’ll be doing will be epidemiology and bioinformatics, though it strongly depends on who asks for help.”  During his most recent job search, he found that one of the aspects of his CV that the “interviewers zeroed in on was a 2nd place award for best essay on Byzantine history that I received while taking Dr. Burns’ class.  They found this very reassuring; they were concerned (with some justification) that someone with strong mathematical skills would necessarily be a poor communicator and have narrow interests. Apparently the award convinced them otherwise because I was offered the job.”  He and his family enjoy life in the Research Triangle area.  He writes, “I have two sons, ages 3 and 6, who are a delight.  They are protected by a guard-bunny named Hop.  My wife is a human geneticist at Duke, though she will soon be starting a new job at UNC Hospital.  We love going to the theater, staying involved with the school system, and being generally over-scheduled.”

He explains that “Durham has–quite unexpectedly–become the hip corner of the Triangle over the last five years.  Downtown has come back to life.  The arts scene is thriving.  And the restaurants… you would be stunned by the selection and quality we have now.  Where else can you get a chana masala taco prepared in a red school bus-turned-taco truck?”  He concludes, “Neither my wife nor I will ever forget the amazing summer we spent digging up a Roman villa in Pecs, Hungary as part of an Emory history department study abroad!”

Pearl Young, B.A./M.A. 2010, writes that “It’s been a year of celebration! This year, 2011, Emory turns 175 years old. As assistant to Emory Vice President Gary Hauk, I’ve had the pleasure of hunting down interesting tidbits of Emory history, from putting together a  list of the first 175 professors to compiling a calendar of “Today in Emory History“. There have been some truly amazing things that have happened here at Emory, and as a proud Emory alumna, it’s been fascinating to learn more about Emory’s past! We’re home to one of the original primate research centers and are also one of the first schools to study law and religion as a unit; we have alumni who have served as vice president of the United States, as fashion designers, as Pulitzer Prize winners, and more! And, to be sure, there’s much Emory trivia as well. For example, April’s Fools may seem like the perfect day to announce yet another ludicrous claim in the Emory Wheel, but it’s also the anniversary of the original celebration of the formal transfer of Emory College to Emory University.”

In the fall, Pearl will be starting a history Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She writes, “I’m looking forward to being in a new place and studying something different. But I know that my heart will often be turning around old Emory’s shrine.”

Robert Elder, Ph.D. 2011, had an article accepted to the Journal of Southern History. He is taking a two-year postdoctoral position in the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University in Indiana. His dissertation examines the intersection of evangelicalism and honor culture in the nineteenth century American South, under the direction of Professor James Roark.

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.