by emoryhistorydept

‘Since Time Immemorial’ Wins Conference on Latin American History’s Kline Prize


Congratulations to Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Department Chair, on winning the Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize from the Conference on Latin American History for her latest book, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press, 2023). The Klein prize is awarded biennially to the book or article in English, German, or a Romance language judged to make the most significant contribution to the history of Indians in Latin America. Since Time Immemorial has received two other major awards: the 2024 Friedrich Katz Prize from the American Historical Association and the 2024 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History. Her first book, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2008), also won the Klein prize. Find the abstract of Since Time Immemorial below, and read the Open Access version of the book (made possible via Emory’s TOME initiative) here.

In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities, parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures. Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend with historical change and produce new rights for the future.

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Graduate Student Alejandro Guardado Wins AHA Beveridge Grant


Doctoral student Alejandro Guardado won the Albert J. Beveridge grant from the American Historical Association for his research project, “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn, 1968–2000.” Guardado’s dissertation centers on Self Determination Movements in Zapotec and Mixe communities in the Sierra Norte of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. He analyzes how Indigenous intellectuals and activists developed networks with micro-regional political coalitions, anthropologists, liberation theologians, and NGOs as a means of renegotiating their relationship to the Mexican government and market forces.

The Beveridge grants support research in the history of the Western Hemisphere, and Guardado was among just 15 graduate students nationwide selected for the prize. Dr. Yanna Yannakis, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Department Chair, serves as Guardado’s dissertation advisor.

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History Major Lucia Alexeyev Traces the Lasting Health Effects of U.S. Occupation in Vieques, Puerto Rico


In the summer of 2025, Emory College senior Lucia Alexeyev conducted research about the relationship between U.S. Naval occupation and residents’ health and access to healthcare on the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico. Alexeyev’s project, titled “Military Occupation and Changing Healthcare Landscapes: Vieques and the U.S. Navy, 1941-2003,” was funded by the History Department’s Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad.

While in the field, Alexeyev observed the effects of the Trump administration’s rescission of research grants through the Environmental Protection Agency. She chronicled the on-the-ground consequences of – and responses to – those cuts in a piece for Nueve Millones, “Vieques’ health investigator seeks funding after EPA’s cancellation: ‘This is just a rock on the road.‘”

Alexeyev is a History major and Global Health, Culture and Society minor. Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History, serves as her thesis adviser. Read an excerpt from the Nueve Millones piece below and find the full article here.

“Even with how politics has changed in the EPA, Estrada Martinez remains hopeful for the study’s completion. She’s inspired by the Viequense community’s 63-year struggle to remove the Navy from the island, plus an additional 20-year battle to obtain funding for VASAC in the first place. ‘This is just a rock on the road, and we will figure out together how to get rid of it and move forward, right?‘”

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Christopher Snyder (PhD, ’94) Named William L. Giles Distinguished Professor at MSU

MSU President Mark E. Keenum is pictured with William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Christopher Snyder, center, and MSU Provost and Executive Vice President David Shaw. PHOTO: Emily Grace McCall | MSU Public Affairs

Dr. Christopher Snyder, a 1994 graduate of the Emory History doctoral program with a concentration in medieval history, has been named a William L. Giles Distinguished Professor at Mississippi State University. The Giles professorships award outstanding research, teaching, and service and are among the highest honors given to faculty at MSU.

Snyder is a professor of history and director of British studies in the Judy and Bobby Shackouls Honors College at MSU, where he served as the college’s founding dean. He has authored ten books and numerous articles in the fields of archaeology, history, literary criticism, ethics, and medieval studies. His most recent book is Hobbit Virtues: Rediscovering Virtue Ethics through J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (New York and London: Pegasus/ Simon & Schuster, 2020).

Snyder’s graduate work at Emory was advised by Tom Burns and Steve White.

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Graduate Student Becca Aponte Publishes Article in ‘Slavery & Abolition’


Second year graduate student Becca Aponte recently published an article in Slavery & Abolition, the premier journal for slavery and emancipation studies. Aponte was a co-author of the article, entitled “Runaway Enslaved Families in Senegal: Mothers, Children, Resistance, and Vulnerabilities, 1857–1903.”

The article was produced as part of the Senegal Liberations Project (of which Aponte is a team member), a digital humanities collaborative formerly funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This project analyzes the liberation records of 28,930 enslaved Africans who sought freedom between 1857 and 1903. 

Aponte’s research interests center on emancipation, labor, and law in the French empire. Her work investigates how women wove, and were woven into, the financial and familial networks of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Senegal. Drs. Mariana P. Candido, Adriana Chira, and Clifton Crais serve as her advisers.

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Jinyu Liu Awarded Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study


Dr. Jinyu Liu, Betty Gage Holland Professor of Roman History, was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in the School of Historical Studies for the fall 2025 semester. This prestigious membership allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international community of scholars at one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.

At IAS, Jinyu Liu will be working on “Outsiders in Town,” which explores social exclusion and the negotiation costs of relocation for mobile and immigrant tradesmen and craftsmen in the Roman West during the first three centuries.

Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most promising post-doctoral researchers and distinguished scholars from around the world to advance fundamental discovery as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. Visiting scholars are selected through a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions by the permanent Faculty—each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Past IAS Faculty include Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, John von Neumann, Hetty Goldman, George Kennan, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Located in Princeton, NJ, the Institute for Advanced Study was established in 1930. Today, research at IAS is conducted across four Schools—Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science—to push the boundaries of human knowledge.

Among past and present scholars, there have been 37 Nobel Laureates, 46 of the 64 Fields Medalists, and 24 of the 28 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.

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Rogers Discusses Policy Shifts at Emory on ’11Alive’


Dr. Thomas D. Rogers, Professor of Latin American History and member of the executive committee of the Emory chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), recently appeared on Atlanta’s 11Alive to discuss Emory’s decision to “discontinue current DEI offices and programs” on campus. That decision was made in an announcement by Interim President Leah Ward Sears at the beginning of September. Rogers relayed students’ concerns about how these changes will affect their experience at Emory and discusses the broader political context within which university administrators are operating.

View the full interview here: “11Alive News: The Take | Emory dismantles DEI programs (9/8/25).”

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Danielle Wiggins (PhD, ’18) Publishes ‘Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism’


Dr. Danielle Wiggins, a 2018 graduate of the U.S. History doctoral program, has published her first monograph: Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Framed by Atlanta in the 1970s and ’80s, Black Excellence “offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.” Marcia Chatelain, author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, describes Wiggins’ work as a “richly researched and beautifully written analysis of the role of Black liberals, a complicated group of scholars, activists, and leaders, who sought racial justice while holding onto antiquated, moralistic, and harmful views of the Black communities that needed justice the most.” Wiggins recently joined the history department at Georgetown University as an assistant professor. She completed her dissertation under the advisement of Dr. Joseph Crespino, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Jimmy Carter Professor of History. Read more about Black Excellence via University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Crespino Outlines How the U.S. Senate Has Changed Over Time on C-SPAN


Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History and Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, was recently featured on C-SPAN discussing how the U.S. Senate has changed over the 20th and 21st centuries. Crespino offered this analysis as a panelist at a congressional briefing organized by the American Historical Association (AHA) in July and also featuring Dr. Joanne B. Freeman (Yale Univ.) and Daniel S. Holt (Senate Historical Office). AHA executive director Sarah Weicksel served as moderator. Learn more about the briefing here, and view the selection from Crespino’s remarks featured by C-SPAN here: “The U.S. Senate in the 20th and 21st Centuries.“

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‘Buried Truths’ Season 5 to Premiere


Season 5 of the podcast Buried Truths, hosted by Professor Hank Klibanoff, Professor of the Practice in Emory’s Creative Writing Program and Associated Faculty in the Department of History, has premiered on WABE. Drawing on research over three semesters that involved 35 Emory undergraduate students, this season investigates “the brutal beating and medical neglect that led to the 1957 death of Rev. Clarence Horatious Pickett, a preacher in Columbus, Georgia.” Read more details about the seven-episode season, titled “A Preacher, a Policeman, and a Physician,” here: “WABE Announces August 26 Premiere of Buried Truths’ Season 5, hosted by Pulitzer and Peabody Award Winner Hank Klibanoff.”

“This story has lived in the margins of history for far too long,” said Buried Truths creator and host Hank Klibanoff. “With the help of research by more than 35 Emory University undergraduate students across three semesters, we’ve tried to give Clarence Pickett the attention and dignity that eluded him in life. His story reveals painful truths—not just about one town or one moment, but about how our systems treat the most vulnerable.”