Bruna Digiacomo Cerveira, fourth-year doctoral candidate in Latin American history, received the 2026 Beveridge Family Research Grant in Western Hemisphere History from the American Historical Association. The grant will support research for her dissertation project, “Liberated African Children Between Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and British Imperialism in Rio de Janeiro, 1831–1888.” Cerveira is among just eleven graduate students in history nationwide to receive the AHA’s Beveridge grant this cycle. Her dissertation is advised by Drs. Mariana P. Candido and Thomas D. Rogers.
Jordyn Alvarez Starr received the 2026 Laney Award for Inclusive Excellence in Graduate Education. This award recognizes students who “engage in service activities that promote inclusivity in the graduate community while also helping to develop and implement strategies to remove barriers for historically marginalized groups and helping them participate fully in graduate education and their respective professions.” Starr was one of four recipients of the award this year.
Starr is a graduate student in Latin American and Caribbean History with research interests centered on struggles against slavery and imperialism in the Spanish Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico. Starr’s dissertation project, titled “Revolutionary Rhetoric: Antislavery and Anticolonial Alliances in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” is advised by Drs. Adriana Chira and Yanna Yannakakis.
Emory’s 2026 Commencement ceremonies took place May 7-11, 2026, and the History Department had many reasons to celebrate. 25 History undergraduate majors or joint majors walked across the stage. Seven of those, after completing compelling original theses under the advisement of dedicated faculty, graduated with honors in History.
Latin American History doctoral candidate Alejandro Guardado defended his dissertation, titled “Indigenous Intellectuals, Cultural Brokers, and the Struggle for Native Self-Determination in Late Twentieth-Century Oaxaca, Mexico.” Kaelyn McAdam, a doctoral student in Ancient history, completed her dissertation, “Understanding the Graeculi: A Greek Roman Empire in the Third and Fourth Centuries,” and graduated in the summer of 2025. Five other graduate students received their interim master’s.
Departmental leadership, faculty, and staff celebrate these exceptional, collective accomplishments of the 2025-’26 academic year.
Yuan Zeng Ashley Tan (Fall 2025) Advisor: Tonio Andrade
The following undergraduates completed either a major or joint major in History and were recognized at the 2026 commencement:
Lucia Kumari Alexeyev Adrien Jonah Dolin Armstrong Daniel Hays Bell Kennedie Amanda Black Ciera Merie Butler Edmund Humphrey Cayley Georgios Drakos Chloe Nanci Glazer Mya D. Green* Isaac Paul Jaye Jiarui Jiang Thora Jordt Alice Liu** Victoria Mia Maza Isabella J. Mazet Lola Kate McGuire Rachel Elizabeth Mehler Javier Andres De Jesus Montano Leo Abraham Raykher Dylan Robert Sanders Villegas Joel Moa Shin Siya Sanjeev Thadani Xipei Wan Megan Xing Yiqi Zhang
* Graduating summer 2026 ** Graduating fall 2026
The following students completed honors thesis and graduated with honors in History.
Lucia Kumari Alexeyev, “Vieques Se Levanta: A History of Health Amidst Occupation” Faculty Director: Professor Jeffrey Lesser
Daniel Bell, “Public Men in Glass Houses: Herbert Jenkins and the Remaking of the Atlanta Police Department, 1947-1972” Faculty Director: Professor Joseph Crespino
Edmund Cayley, “The First East Turkestan Republic: The Rise of 20th Century Uyghur Nationalism” Faculty Director: Professor Matthew Payne
Lola McGuire, “‘This stand I make is not alone’: Uncovering the Chicago Young Patriots Organization Women, 1968-1973” Faculty Director: Professor Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez
Leo Raykher, “Economics, Espionage, Exile: The Surveilled Life of David Drucker, Esq.” Faculty Director: Professor Jonathan Prude
Siya Thadani, “Medicalizing Difference: Science and the Making of Race in the British Empire” Faculty Director: Professor Chris Suh
Thomas Wan, “For the Nation and the Revolution: Inner Mongols in the Shadow of Empire and Civil War (1931-49)” Faculty Director: Professor Matthew Payne
Read the abstract from Cunning’s Modern American History article below and find the full version here.
This article explores the programs known as Project 100,000 and Project Transition developed within the Johnson administration during the Vietnam War. Viewing them as the intersection between the War on Poverty and the War in Vietnam, this article contends with how these programs were designed to serve the goals both of social uplift and crime prevention through the rehabilitation of low-IQ men via military service. The article analyzes the racialized aspects of these programs, as they were disproportionately composed of Black men, and questions the motivations behind the construction of Project 100,000 and Project Transition as a means of “transporting” America’s racial unrest abroad. At its core, the article argues that these programs were inherently at odds with the intense manpower demands of the Vietnam War and the reluctancies of military officials to properly train Project 100,000 men. The program formed another tragedy of the Vietnam era.
Alejandro Guardado, a 2026 graduate of the Latin American History doctoral program, has won the Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Award from Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. Guardado’s project is titled “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn, 1968–2000.”
Inaugurated in 2025, Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Awards honor the life and legacy of Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the Peruvian priest and theologian widely seen as the father of Latin American liberation theology. The award supports projects in theology, history, and the social sciences that engage or take inspiration from Gutiérrez’s work on the preferential option for the poor.
Kreklau published her first book, The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910, with Berghahn Books earlier this year. The book as well as the new article originated in a research paper that Kreklau completed during coursework at Emory. Termed the “P-Paper” and produced by every graduate student before candidacy, this milestone helps students to develop their dissertation projects and lays the foundation for academic publication early in doctoral training.
Read the abstract of the German Studies Review article below along with the full piece here.
In 1818, the manorial lord Ludwig Ellrichshausen used his agricultural estate in Maisenhälden as a laboratory for optimized economic exploitation during a period of extreme climatic crisis. He designed a minimum-feed diet for his workers that was low in protein, devoid of fruits and vegetables, and insufficient in calories to support hard physical labor with the goal of engineering their bare subsistence to maximize outputs. The Speisemeister’s or master of food’s dietary prescription functioned as a means of social control in this Atlantic Hinterland, constructed to communicate social positioning via the symbolically charged means of food.
Patrick Allitt, Professor of History at Emory University, told Newsweek: “The king’s had a lifetime of experience in not talking about policy details. I think when he was younger, he periodically did make some rather gauche intrusions into policy questions, particularly about the environment but gradually, he’s learned the lesson that his job is to be head of state and not head of government
Allitt argued the monarchy was a powerful tool for warming up public opinion and said that “because the British monarchy is insanely popular in America, even Trump has got the good sense to realize, ‘I can only benefit from showing the king and his wife a good time’ and avoiding all the things which have created rancor between himself and Starmer.
“So it’s actually a very non-political event, even though people will construe it as being one with political resonances.”
“The nature of politics in both countries is that people from different parts of the spectrum disagree about the rights and wrongs of what’s happening,” he continued, “but I think that the really astonishing part of this whole story is that for nearly 250 years, or since 1815, since the end of the War of 1812, Britain and America have never gone to war against each other.
“And usually when one empire is in decline and another one is in the ascendance, they fight over it but in this case, they never did.”
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.”
