Senior History majors Daniel Bell and Leo Raykher recently presented their honors theses as part of the 2025-’26 cohort of Fox Center Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellows. A senior double-majoring in Economics, Bell’s thesis examines the life and career of Herbert Jenkins, Atlanta’s influential twentieth-century police chief. Raykher’s research explores espionage, surveillance, and political freedom in the United States through the life of his great, great-uncle, David Drucker, a strident advocate for socialist causes and political exile in Mexico.
Both projects echo the Fox Center’s 2025-’26 theme, Life/Story, which “draws its inspiration from the many ways humanities fields and disciplines often approach a single life as the entry point for examining broad political, socio-cultural, and historical phenomena.”
The Undergraduate Committee is pleased to announce the recipients of the Emory History Department’s undergraduate senior prizes for the 2025-26 academic year. These awards were presented at our annual Senior Celebration on Tuesday, April 28, from 1:00-3:00 pm, in the Brooks Commons.
Congratulations to the following awardees for their outstanding work in history:
The African, Asian, and Latin American History Prize for best record in African, Asian, and Latin American History
🙞 Lucia Alexeyev 🙜
James Z. Rabun Prize for the best record in American History
🙞 Kennedie Black 🙜
George P. Cuttino Prize for the best record in European History
🙞 Edmund Cayley 🙜
James Z. Rabun Prize for the best record in American History
In the spring 2026 semester, Dr. Carl Suddler, Associate Professor of History, and Emory sociologist Dr. Karida Brown have offered an interdisciplinary course called “Sports, Power, and Society.” Building on the “Last Lectures” series, a curriculum developed by Civil Rights icon and sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards, the course analyzes how sport intersects with an array of topics, from race, politics, and fashion to urban planning, inequality, and global power.
Students in the spring course have benefitted from the proximity of the upcoming FIFA World Cup, which will bring the high-stakes global soccer to Atlanta and 15 other host cities in North America this summer. Atlanta and Los Angeles are the only two cities in the U.S. to host both a summer Olympic games and the World Cup. This fact, Suddler and Brown argue, have made Emory the ideal place to study the power of sport in shaping culture, cities, economies, and everyday life.
Emory History graduate students Andrew Aldridge (U.S. History, 5th year) and Tymesha-Elizabeth Kindell (U.S. History, 2nd year) serve as teaching assistants for the course.
Fox 5 Atlanta recently interviewed Suddler about the offering, the World Cup’s impact on Atlanta, and parallels between the 2026 mega event and the 1996 Olympics. Find the conversation here: “Emory offers class on impact of FIFA World Cup.”
L-R: Herman Lindsey, Cortney Lawler, Corinna Barret Lain, Katherine Raeymaekers (Consul General of Belgium), Daniel LaChance
Dr. Daniel LaChance, Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Law and Associate Professor of History, recently spoke at a public event about the death penalty hosted by the School of Law at Georgia State University. Organized by the consulates of Belgium, France, Ireland, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the event was titled “Justice or Injustice? Moral and Legal Questions Around Capital Punishment.” Find the full program here.
Dr. Sean T. Byrnes, a 2014 graduate of the doctoral program in U.S. history, recently published his second book, The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776, with Bloomsbury Press. The four-century history examines the relationship between the United States, empire, and decolonization from the revolutionary war through the present.
Byrnes’s research centers on U.S. politics, international relations, and global economic inequality. His first book, Disunited Nations: U.S. Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, was published by LSU Press in 2021. His writings have also appeared in Time, The New Republic, Dissent, Jacobin, Diplomatic History, Diplomatica, International Journal, and for the History News Network. He hosts conversations with authors on the New Books Network, serves on the Board of Editors for Federal History, and is a Section Editor for the newly released Routledge Online Encyclopedia of the Cold War.
Byrnes completed his doctoral training under the advisement of Dr. Fraser Harbutt.
Read an abstract of the Byrnes’s new book below and learn more via Bloomsbury Press.
Few topics are more important to understanding the origins of the modern world than decolonization, and few countries have played a more important role in that history than the United States.In this book, Sean T. Byrnes provides a definitive, single-volume account of the relationship between the United States, decolonization, and world order.
Through a lively narrative history that ranges across four centuries, Byrnes reveals how the process of ending and replacing empires defined the American relationship to the world from the colonial era to the present. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution, hierarchies born of the imperial age—and defined by ideas about race, capitalism, and civilization—fundamentally shaped American views of who was entitled to sovereignty and when. Therefore, far from building a world of “Westphalian” sovereign equality, the United States instead manipulated, expanded, and then attempted to dominate globe spanning structures of wealth and power that served the few at the expense of the many.
From early interactions with Native Americans and a decolonizing Latin America, to efforts to bolster global hierarchies after the World Wars and influence the postcolonial “Third World”, The United States and the Ends of Empire, tells the story of a US that may not always have embraced formal empire but nevertheless still sought to organize the world in imperial ways. In the process, it reveals how Americans helped build today’s modern, globalized world—and the unequal hierarchies of wealth and power that define it.
She has served as Chair of Liberal Arts at PNCA since 2020, and her scholarly interests have expanded to include pedagogy, writing, and research in the humanities with a focus on artists and designers.
Her recently published works include a chapter on pedagogical strategies for teaching Immigration to Latin America and the Handbook of Latin American Studies, published by the Library of Congress, for which she is the Modern Argentina editor. Nouwen completed her dissertation under the advisement of Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History.
Congratulations to History Department alum Dr. Diego Javier Luis on receiving the American Historical Association’s Jerry Bentley Prize in World History for his first book,The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (Harvard University Press, 2024). This is the fourth prize for Luis’s work, following the 2024 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard UP, the 2025 Howard F. Cline Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association, and the 2025 Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions Book Prize.
Luis’s acclaimed work offers “The definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas.” In his review in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Rubén Carillo Martín describes the book as “a brilliant exercise of global microhistory and essential reading for anyone hoping to get a full picture of colonial Spanish America, Asian diaspora studies, or protoglobalization.”
Luis is Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor at The Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Emory in 2014 with a double major in History with highest honors and English and Creative Writing, before pursuing his PhD at Brown University.
The Atlanta History Center (AHC) recently hosted Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham in conversation with Dr. Patrick Allitt of the Emory History Department. Meacham spoke about his new book, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union (Penguin Random House, 2026), which “unites centuries of essential American voices to understand our national debates and divisions from 1619 to the present.” David Plazas, opinion editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, published a piece about the AHC event (subscription required) here.
Dr. Benjamin P. Hein, a 2010 Emory History alum and now Assistant Professor at Brown University, has published his first book: The Migrant’s Spirit: How Industrial Modernity Came to the German Lands (Oxford UP, 2025). Weaving economic history and the history of financial institutions with immigration and cultural history, The Migrant’s Spirit locates the impetus for Germany’s industrial modernization in transatlantic exchanges between German society and the expanding German diaspora in nineteenth-century North America.
Hein completed honors in history working with Professors Astrid M. Eckert and Brian Vick. He was awarded the 2010 Matthew A. Carter Citizen-Scholar Award, given to a graduating student who displays high academic achievement and good works in the community. He received his PhD at Stanford University in 2018.
Read the full description of The Migrant’s Spirit:
When a process popularly known as the Industrial Revolution first took hold in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, many contemporaries were stunned by the scale and ferocity of the transformation. While Germany had long been considered a promising place to industrialize, given its historic ties to New World markets, skilled and educated workforce, and deep pockets of wealth, progress had been slow due to persistent indifference and skepticism across society. That people should have suddenly dropped their reservations and simply embraced the new industrial modernity defied all explanation. Grasping for answers, some concluded that the Germans must have fallen under the spell of the “capitalist spirit.”
Benjamin P. Hein locates the impetus for the abrupt transformation of German society after ca. 1850 in its cultural exchange with the country’s burgeoning diaspora in North America, one of the largest in this century. In correspondence and other “news from America,” the emigrants conveyed to their families, communities, and business associates in Europe a different set of norms and ethics regarding work, entrepreneurship, and commerce. By making it socially acceptable and politically meaningful to frequently change professions or to organize businesses as joint-stock corporations, they inadvertently mobilized an otherwise reluctant population for a more centralized regime of production that served global market forces instead of local needs and corporatist norms. They also helped popularize key institutional pillars of the new economy, like the universal bank, and inspired innovative commercial reforms, most notably the “limited liability partnership” (LLP), or “G.m.b.H.” in German, which became the legal foundation of Germany’s particularly robust small-business economy.
While addressing global trends, The Migrant’s Spirit makes these phenomena comprehensible through the lives of individuals who faced painful choices and moral quandaries as they attempted to navigate a new social and economic order and began to trust countrymen abroad over local sources of guidance. By reconstructing their struggles, Hein sheds new light on the transatlantic dimensions of Germany’s path to industrial modernity.
Junior history major Rafi Escoto recently published a paper in the Central Europe Yearbook, an open-access journal promoting the study of Central Europe among undergraduate students. Titled “Everything Old is New Again: Border Rituals and the Return of History in ‘Green Border,’” Escoto’s paper analyses Agnieszka Holland’s 2023 film about refugees from the Middle East and Africa who attempt to reach the European Union, only to become caught up in a geopolitical crisis triggered by the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.
This paper argues that Green Border (2023), directed by Agnieszka Holland, transforms the Polish-Belarusian border into a site of moral ritual, where sacred violence replaces humanitarian law. Using Durkheim’s theories, Eastern European memory studies, and analyses of populism and asylum policy, the paper interprets the film as a historical recurrence rather than a modern crisis. Drawing on scholars like Törnquist-Plewa, Exeler, and Krastev, the analysis reveals how Europe’s border politics ritualize exclusion and revive authoritarian patterns under democratic guise. Methods include close film analysis and engagement with secondary literature on EU identity, populism, and the symbolic politics of migration.
