Dr. Carol Anderson was recently a guest on CBS News, where she discussed the state of American democracy. Anderson offers historical context about both the distant and recent roots to undemocratic practices in the U.S. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor and Affiliated Faculty in the History Department. Watch the full interview here: “Concerns raised about the future of democracy in America.”
U.S. Senate Confirms Lipstadt to Antisemitism Post
The United States Senate has confirmed Emory historian Deborah E. Lipstadt to serve as a special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism across the globe. Although Republicans in the Senate delayed Lipstadt’s confirmation for months, she received unanimous approval in the vote on March 30. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read more about the envoy position and recent confirmation here: “Historian Deborah Lipstadt confirmed as envoy to combat antisemitism after push from Jewish groups.”
Anderson Interviewed on FAIR Podcast ‘CounterSpin’
Dr. Carol Anderson was recently interviewed on CounterSpin, the weekly radio show of the national media watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). Anderson discusses the relationship between white supremacy and the struggle for democracy in the United States, including by drawing on her most recent book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021). Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African-American Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the History Department. Read and listen to the FAIR piece here: “Carol Anderson on History, Race and Democracy.”
History Major Bronwen Boyd Named 2022 Graduating Woman of Excellence
Congratulations to History major Bronwen Boyd on being named a 2022 Graduating Woman of Excellence by the Center for Women at Emory. Each year the Center invites the community to identify graduating women who have demonstrated great effort, strength of character, and excellence in their time at Emory. Boyd was among 50 outstanding graduates from across Emory’s college, graduate, and professional school divisions honored at a pinning ceremony on March 24.
Graduate Student Anjuli Webster Presents at “Charting African Waterscapes” Conference
History graduate student Anjuli Webster recently presented a paper at the conference “Charting African Waterscapes: A Conference on African Maritime History Across Time and Space.” Webster’s paper was titled “’Kawubheke ukuphangelana kwemifula’: isiNguni waters through Maputo Bay” and was delivered on the panel “Political Ecologies of Water.” Webster’s research uses water as a way to understand the convergence of local and global forces in south Indianic Africa in the nineteenth century. Webster’s dissertation is titled “Water’s Power: Ecologies of Sovereignty, Race, and Resistance in south Indianic Africa.”
Jia-Chen Fu in ‘Atlas Obscura’: “The Secret Maoist Chinese Operation to Conquer Malaria”
Dr. Jia-Chen Fu, Associate Professor of Chinese and Affiliated Faculty in the History Department, recently published an article in Atlas Obscura. Titled “The Secret Maoist Chinese Operation to Conquer Malaria,” the piece recounts the discovery of the most powerful antimalarial drug available today by a young Chinese medical researcher named Tu Youyou in the 1960s-’70s. The breakthrough came during the Cultural Revolution in China and the Vietnam War, context within which Fu situates Youyou’s signal achievement. Read the full story here.
Graduate Student Katrina Knight Presents at Univ. of Maryland HGSA Graduate Conference
History graduate student Katrina Knight recently presented at the University of Maryland’s 16th annual Graduate History Conference. Delivered on a panel with the theme “Histories of Subaltern Revolt,” Knight’s paper was titled “Rebellion, Reformation, or Romanization? The Barbarian Reges and the ‘End’ of the Western Roman Empire.” The focus of the conference this year was “Conflict, Protest, Insurrection, Coup.” Knight’s research centers on the ways in which Roman cultural identity intersected with provincial identity during and after the Roman Empire. Her dissertation is titled “Becoming UnRoman: Romans and Romanness in Late Antique and Early Medieval Britain and Italy, AD 400-700.”
Six History Honors Students Present at Fox Center’s Undergraduate Honors Colloquium
Six History Honors students will present at the upcoming Undergraduate Honors Colloquium, convened by the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. The History majors featured and the titles of their talks are:
- Scott Benigno: “Depicting Zulu: Race, Empire, and Zulu Representations in the British Metropole, 1820s-1910”
- Bronwen Boyd: “Ceci n’est pas une signare: Locating Women in Nineteenth-Century Urban Coastal Senegal: Using French Representations of the Signares”
- Hannah Charak: “Terror from the Top Down: Violence and Voter Suppression in the Postwar South”
- Willie Lieberman: “The Mystery of England’s First Great Opera: Nahum Tate, Dido, and Womanhood”
- Julien Nathan: “Who is the Nation: Democratization of Leftist Media in West Berlin”
- Matthew Takavarasha: “Apostates of the Rechtsstaat: Jurisprudence between Weimar Democracy and Nazi
Dictatorship”
The event will take place on Wednesday, April 6th, 2022, from 4-6pm EST in Ackerman Hall on the 3rd floor of the Carlos Museum.
Anderson Contributes to ‘NYT’ Panel “Where Does American Democracy Go From Here?”
Dr. Carol Anderson recently contributed to a New York Times panel focused on the theme “Where Does American Democracy Go From Here?” The six panelists offer historical and contemporary perspectives on the state of democracy in the U.S., which has fallen in recent rankings that measure the vitality of democracies across the globe. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department. She is the author, most recently, of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury Press, 2021). Read one of Anderson’s contributions to the panel below and find the full piece here.
“Anderson: What we’re seeing, I liken it to a land, sea and air attack. The land attack is on voting rights. That is one of the ways that you begin to undermine democracy. The sea attack are these attacks against teaching critical race theory and “divisive” topics, so you can erase people from American history and erase the role of various people in American history. And the air attack is the loosening of Texas and Tennessee both passed laws allowing for permitless carrying of firearms in 2021; the Georgia State Legislature passed a similar bill this year. This is a full-blown assault on American democracy that’s going after voting rights, that’s going after education and that is reinforcing political violence as an acceptable method of bringing about your political aims. That’s where we are, and that’s why this moment is so dangerous.“
Undergraduate Majors Russell and Walker Among Recipients of Robert T. Jones Scholarships
Congratulations to history majors Channelle Russell and Bryn Walker on receiving Emory’s prestigious Robert T. Jones scholarship. In 2022 four graduating seniors were selected for the scholarship, which supports one year of postgraduate study at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Read the Emory News Center’s short biographical profiles of Russell and Walker below, and check out the other recipients of the awards here.
Channelle Russell
An English and history joint major, with a minor in anthropology, Russell has a deep interest in storytelling.
“From a young age, I have been interested in storytelling as a way to explore and interrogate the world,” Russell says.
Finding her major fields as a sophomore, she pursued a course of study devoted to issues of power, race and gender through scholar-writers such as Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison, among others. “Like me, they are all Black women with a story to share,” Russell says.
A first-generation college student who resides in Atlanta, she plans to undertake a master’s degree in creative writing in prose at the University of St Andrews. Her academic interests were born from “the silences and gaps of the literary canon,” as she sought “the ghosts of Black women.” Her work as an undergraduate allowed her to negotiate herself into the narratives that she wanted to read, and subsequently into the narratives that she wants to create, hallmarks that can be seen through her work as an arts and entertainment writer with the Emory Wheel and as the editor-in-chief of Blackstar* Magazine.
Awarded a Woodruff Dean’s Achievement Scholarship at the end of her first year, she was described by a recommender as having “an expansive intellect, keen wit, compassion, poise and thoughtful perspectives on various issues in the world.” She is currently a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, and her honors thesis investigates gender, sound and slavery in textual representation of Jamaican women.
Bryn Walker
A graduate of Emory’s Oxford College, Walker was described by one of her recommenders as a “delightful person who brings humility, good humor and a mature point of view to all that she undertakes.” A history major who was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 2021, Walker’s research interests relate to the American South, cultural and social movements, public history and historical memory.
She was drawn to undertake a master’s degree in museum and heritage studies because of an interest in the “parallels between memory in the U.S. South, which was part of my undergraduate research focus, and Scottish historical memory. Methodologically, the U.K. has a much more robust tradition of public history and I’d like to expand the possibilities for public history scholarship in the United States.”
A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, the first-generation college student’s time at Emory has been marked by a dedication to service. Currently a research ambassador for Emory College’s Undergraduate Research Program, Walker has also spent time on both the Oxford College and Emory College Honor Councils, helped new students acclimate to Emory as a two-time orientation leader and was a diversity ambassador for Oxford College’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
Issues of diversity have played a significant role in Walker’s research experiences to date, including work on country-level migration policy responses to COVID-19, and a 10-week research fellowship studying Confederate monuments in Georgia and tracing the Georgia United Daughters of the Confederacy’s relationship to state government officials.
Beyond Emory, her public history focus has resulted in two internship experiences, one as an interpretive intern with the National Parks Service at Mount Rushmore National Park and the other with the Teaching with Primary Sources Program at the Library of Congress.