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History Major Wittika Chaplet Wins George P. Cuttino Scholarship

Congratulations to junior History Major Wittika Chaplet on winning a George P. Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad. Chaplet will conduct research in France and Burkina Faso for her Honors thesis over the summer of 2022. Her working title is “West African Visions of a Verdant Urban Future: A Microhistory of Burkina Faso’s Urban Gardens.”

She writes that “Dr. Clifton Crais, Dr. Thomas Rogers, Dr. Mariana Candido, & Dr. Susan Gagliardi have been wonderfully supportive through the process of proposing my honor’s thesis.” Moreover, “Dr. Anouar El Younssi supported me from the very beginning of my time at Emory & has been immensely helpful over the past three years.”

The prize is named for Prof. George Cuttino (1914-1991), who taught at Emory for 32 years. He was a beloved professor and held the Candler Chair in Medieval History. He was a two-time Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and chaired the Emory History Department in the early 1970’s before retiring in 1984.

The summer fellowship recipients will present their research to the department at an event this coming fall semester.

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Katie Wilson Named LGS’s Outstanding Program Administrator in the Humanities for 2022

From left to right: Katie Wilson, Humanities; Roberta Lynn, Cancer Biology; Renee Sevy-Hasterok, Economics; Joanna Young, Bioethics; Kimberly Jacob Arriola, Vice Provost for Graduate Affairs and Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies; Jeffrey K. Staton, Senior Associate Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies.

Congratulations to Katie Wilson, Senior Graduate Academic Degree Program Coordinator, on receiving the Laney Graduate School’s Outstanding Program Administrator in the Humanities Award. 2022 is the inaugural year for the award. The faculty, staff, and students of the History Department are delighted that Wilson has received this recognition for her 11 years of outstanding work in the Department.

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Chira Receives NEH Summer Stipend and Postdoc at Harvard

Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of History, has been awarded two external grants to support work on her new project, “In the Plantations’ Shadow: Black Peasants and Land Claims in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spanish Equatorial Guinea, 1850-1950.” Chira received an NEH Summer Stipend for this coming summer and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University for AY 2022-23 to work on the same project. Chira’s first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race Beyond Cuba’s Plantations, was published by Cambridge earlier this year. Congratulations, Professor Chira!

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History Major Alex Levine Wins George P. Cuttino Prize in European History

Congratulations to Emory History major Alex Levine, who has won the George P. Cuttino Prize in European history. The Prize is given to the graduating senior with the best record in European History.  Levin will teach English in Greenland next year on a Fulbright.

Levine notes that Dr. Brian Vick has been an extremely important, intellectually stimulating, and caring mentor. Dr. Tonio Andrade and Dr. Teresa Davis have also been valuable mentors and role models. The encouragement of these three professors has been very meaningful to Alex. Among the most influential classes he took were Dr. Andrade’s “China & the World” colloquium, which has helped him better conceptualize the modern “West,” and Dr. Tehila Sasson’s graduate course, “After Empire.”

This prize was established in 1984 to honor Professor George P. Cuttino on the occasion of his retirement after thirty-two years’ service in the Department of History.

The award will be officially presented at the department’s Senior Celebration on Wednesday, April 27.

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History Majors Charak, Coleman, Levitt, and Russell Initiated into Phi Beta Kappa

 Hannah, Ben, & Chanelle are pictured here, along with Haley Rubin, who has taken many History Dept. courses. Ayriel Coleman not pictured here.

Four History majors were recently initiated into the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Emory. They are: Hannah Charak, Ayriel Coleman, Ben Levitt, and Channelle Russell. They were among just 35 Emory seniors inducted into the organization. Phi Beta Kappa’s Gamma Chapter of Georgia was established at Emory University on April 5th, 1929. Congratulations!

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Phi Beta Kappa Recognizes Emory History Faculty for Excellence in Teaching

The Phi Beta Kappa Gamma Chapter of Georgia at Emory recently recognized four History Department faculty members for excellence in teaching. The faculty members are:

The faculty members were recognized at the spring initiation ceremony on April 14, 2022.

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Federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board Faces Time Crunch

In February of this year the U.S. Congress confirmed Professor Hank Klibanoff to the Federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board. The board has been charged with processing records of racially-motivated crimes from 1940-’79 that remain unsolved. A recent article from the Courthouse News Service provides an overview of the board’s work and discusses the time crunch the four-member team is under. As the 2019 law that sanctioned the establishment of the board was written, the work must be completed within four years. Klibanoff and other board members have yet to be sworn in, however, a delay that will pose serious challenges for the commission’s efforts. Klibanoff is James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read more via this article: “Newly formed board to review Civil Rights-era cold cases faces time crunch.“

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Lesser Named 2022 Eleanor Main Graduate Faculty Mentor

Congratulations to Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research, on receiving the 2022 Eleanor Main Graduate Faculty Mentor Award. Named for an extraordinary Emory faculty member, mentory, and leader, the Main award has the following aims: to recognize outstanding faculty who are engaged in the Emory/LGS community and academic or professional communities related to their discipline through mentorship; to legitimize the importance of mentoring of graduate students within the larger context of graduate education; and to foster mentoring of the highest quality. Lesser’s nomination was supported by faculty in multiple programs across campus as well as PhD program alumni, who cited him as an inspiring mentor of graduate students. The award will be presented at the 2022 commencement ceremony.

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Payne Wins 2022 Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award

Congratulations to Dr. Matthew J. Payne, Associate Professor of History, on winning the 2022 Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. This award was established by Emory Williams, a 1932 Emory College alumnus and long-time trustee, and recognizes faculty who strive for excellence in teaching, curriculum development, pedagogy, and educational innovation. The award recognizes faculty members who teach undergraduate students at Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Goizueta Business School, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, and Oxford College. Dr. Payne has excelled in fostering participation, inquiry, and creative expression in the classroom, exemplified the highest quality of teaching scholarship through teaching and mentoring students, retained a continual record of outstanding accomplishment and ongoing commitment to teaching, and made significant contributions that impact and advance Emory. Payne will be recognized at the 2022 Commencement ceremony.

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Danielle Lee Wiggins (PhD ’18) Wins ACLS Fellowship

Dr. Danielle Lee Wiggins, Assistant Professor at the California Institute of Technology and a 2018 graduate of the PhD program, has won a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Wiggins is one of sixty scholars nationwide selected for the prestigious ACLS Fellowship, which recognizes outstanding scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The fellowship will support Wiggins’s work on her current manuscript project, titled “The Politics of Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Politics.” Jimmy Carter Professor of History Dr. Joseph Crespino served as Wiggins’s advisor at Emory. Read the abstract of Wiggins’s project below.

“This project examines how black political leaders in Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s managed three challenges associated with the postindustrial urban crisis—crime, family instability, and joblessness— with what this project calls the ‘politics of black excellence.’ This approach entailed the expansion of existing practices of racial uplift into the realm of policy. Adherents sought to discipline black people with policies purported to fortify black communities against the internal threat of ‘black-on-black’ crime, restore the black nuclear family, and cultivate diligent black workers. This study argues that in proposing reform of the self, the family, and black communities as solutions to structural crises, Atlanta’s black political class innovated new modes of black politics and Democratic governance.“