Dr. Kenneth Stein, Emeritus Professor of History, recently discussed the war in Gaza on LiveNOW, a national news service powered by FOX television stations. Stein analyzes the state of the military campaign, humanitarian needs of Gaza residents, and the geopolitical implications of the war. A scholar and public intellectual, Stein has contributed widely to scholarship and policy on contemporary Middle Eastern history, political science, and Israeli studies. Watch the conversation here: “Gaza ceasefire: Israel has agreed to a framework, US says.”
The History Department was pleased to receive an update from Kate Nowak, a former History major who graduated from the College in 2019. Since graduation, Nowak has been working as a defense paralegal with Swift, Currie, McGhee, & Hiers in Atlanta. She works directly with two firm partners to manage their caseload. She is thankful for the analytical thinking and writing skills that she honed in the Emory History Department. She puts them to use daily in legal work. She was also elected as Paralegal Liaison and enjoys building interpersonal connections with her team as well as with new hires through firm training programs and meetings.
Are you an Emory History alum? Please send us updates on your life and work!
African history graduate student Anjuli Webster has published two new articles drawing on her doctoral research. The first, a short piece titled “Water and History in Southern Africa,” was published as an Open Access “History Matters” contribution in the Journal of African History. The second article, titled “Inter-Imperial Entanglement: The British Claim to Portuguese Delagoa Bay in the Nineteenth Century,” appeared in the Journal of World History. Webster wrote the original version of this article in the graduate student seminar (HIST 584) and under the supervision of Drs. Clifton Crais and Jason Morgan Ward. Webster thanks the Research Workshop in History at Emory for support in the process of revisions and the History PhD program for funding image reproduction fees.
Webster’s dissertation, “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in southern Africa, 1750-1900,” explores transformations in sovereignty and ecology in southern Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries. She has won many grants for her research, including from the American Society for Environmental History, Harvard Center for History and Economics, the Luso-American Development Foundation, and Emory’s “Visions of Slavery” Mellon Sawyer Seminar.
The History Department was delighted to receive an update from Dr. Alex Borucki, a 2011 alumnus of the graduate program and Professor of History at the University of California Irvine. Read Borucki’s update below:
“I have worked in collaborative research since my days in Bowden Hall by witnessing the creation of the Slave Voyages website fifteen years ago, but I engaged in a radically different way of teamwork more recently.
“In 2021, the writer/cartoonist/marketing mastermind Gonzalo Eyherabide asked me for historical guidance because he was creating a graphic history, or historieta histórica in Spanish, about Joaquín Artigas, an African man who had fought in the wars of independence in the early 1800s Uruguay, and who was enslaved to the family of Uruguay’s founding father, José Artigas.
“As a result of two years of emails and discussions, Gonzalo adapted my article about the U.S. slave ship Ascension to recreate the story of Joaquín’s enslavement in Mozambique (because we knew Joaquín was from there) and, subsequently, his forced crossing of the South Atlantic.
“Early in 2023, Artigas: Un Patriota sin Patria was published in Montevideo, selling 3000 copies in a semester, and a second edition was released by the end of 2023. I met Gonzalo while visiting Montevideo last December when he gifted me a copy of his beautiful work. He also drew on the first blank page of the book a fine depiction of me and him talking in the bar next to the Río de la Plata, or River Plate, where we usually met. He added this inscription: ‘Culture is and must be generosity and solidarity,’ which encapsulates some of the best collaborative research outcomes.”
Dr. Carol Anderson, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently a guest on “Created Equal,” a radio show/podcast hosted by award-winning journalists Stephen Henderson and Laura Weber Davis out of WDET in Detroit. The conversation draws on Anderson’s 2016 book White Rage: the Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury), which analyzes how and why historic gains by African Americans toward full(er) democratic citizenship in the U.S. have, throughout the nation’s history, consistently accompanied a “white reaction [that] has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains.” Find the Feb 7, 2024 interview on the “Created Equal” archive stream (organized by date) here: “What is white rage? And what really divides our nation?“
The Association for the Worldwide Study of the African Diaspora has awarded Adriana Chira’s Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022) with its First Book Prize. The ASWAD prize marks the book’s fifth award, following: Honorable Mention, Best Book, Nineteenth Century Section, from the Latin American Studies Association; the 2023 Elsa Goveia Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians; the American Historical Association’s Rawley Prize; and the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. Patchwork Freedoms was released as part of Cambridge’s Afro-Latin America series. Learn about this year’s other ASWAD prize winners. Congratulations, Professor Chira!
Through the generous support of donors, the History Department is pleased to offer multiple funding opportunities for undergraduates in the summer of 2024 to pursue research, study, or experiential learning in the United States or abroad. Students graduating in the fall of 2024 or spring of 2025 are eligible. Applications should include a faculty letter of recommendation and be submitted electronically to Becky Herring by 4pm on March 4. Browse a summary of our funding programs below, and find more details on the Undergraduate Research section of our website.
The Loren & Gail Starr Award in Experiential Learning: The Undergraduate Studies Committee hopes to fund up to *5* experiential learning projects proposed by History majors or minors with junior or senior status. The awards, which can range from $500 to $3,000 each, are intended to support students who wish to use the knowledge & skills they have acquired in history courses to create or participate in projects in settings outside of the classroom. The committee seeks proposals from students that are bold, creative, & off-the-beaten path. The only rule is that engagement with the past be central to the experience undertaken by the student.
George P. Cuttino Scholarship for Independent Research Abroad: The Cuttino Scholarship is offered annually to rising senior history majors or joint majors in Emory College. The scholarship provides for a summer of research and travel abroad between the students’ junior and senior year. The stipend may be up to $10,000. All junior history majors and joint majors in Emory College with a cumulative G.P.A. of 3.0 or above are eligible. Early in the spring semester (normally mid-February) a notice with deadline for submission of Cuttino Scholarship applications to the Director of Undergraduate Studies is issued. The Cuttino Scholarship recipient is selected by the Department of History Undergraduate Committee.
George P. Cuttino Fellowship for Summer Programs Abroad: The Cuttino Fellowships for Summer Programs Abroad are offered annually to rising senior history and joint history majors in Emory College for study outside the United States in a summer study program. Priority is given to students enrolled in Emory Study Abroad programs. Several awards are given each year and can be as much as $4,000 each. The recipients of the fellowships must provide documentation of enrollment in an academic summer study abroad program in order to receive the awarded funds. Upon returning to Emory in the fall, the recipients must also provide documentation of their successful completion of the summer study program.
Theodore H. Jack Award for Independent Research in the US: The Theodore H. Jack Award is offered annually to an Emory College history major or joint history major who has attained senior status (75+ credit hours) at the time of the award. It provides modest funds for summer research in the United States outside the city of Atlanta on topics that deal in whole or in part with American history. It is expected that recipients will use the award to research an honors thesis, though students not in the honors program are welcome to apply.
James L. Roark Prize for Independent Research in the US: The James L. Roark Prize will be awarded annually to advanced undergraduate History majors (75+ credit hours). The award will provide funds for undergraduate research in American history to be conducted within the United States over one summer.Recipients will be expected to use the prize towards research for an honors thesis, or a similarly significant research project.
Bell I. Wiley Prize in U.S. History for Independent Research in the US: The Wiley Prize is offered annually to an Emory College history major or joint major who has attained senior status (75+ credit hours) at the time of the award. It provides funds for summer travel within the United States outside of the city of Atlanta in support of innovative research in the history of the United States. It is expected that recipients will use the award to research an honors thesis, though students not in the honors program are welcome to apply. All history and joint history majors with senior status in Emory College and with a cumulative G.P.A. of 3.0 or above are eligible.
Carl Suddler (far right) with top current and former European soccer players
Dr. Carl Suddler, Associate Professor of History, recently spoke at a landmark gathering of European soccer players held in the United Kingdom. The conference brought together towering figures of the sport, such as Lilian Thuram, Thierry Henry, Christian Karembeu, Robert Pires, Olivier Dacourt, Zé Maria, Viv Anderson, and Stan Collymore, seeking to advance anti-racist and gender equity initiatives in the game. The Emory News Center published a wonderful feature of Suddler’s experience, including how the players inspired him to expand his talk beyond the planned topic – the history of US activism in sport – to broach why countries around the world struggle to reckon with the racialized inequities and prejudices that have long structured their societies. Suddler is the author, most recently, of Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (NYU, 2019). Read the full Emory News Center piece here: “Emory professor Carl Suddler speaks at landmark European soccer summit seeking anti-racism, gender-equity actions.”
Dr. Julia Lopez Fuentes, a 2020 graduate of the History doctoral program and upper school teacher at the National Cathedral School, was recently awarded the 2023 European Studies First Article Prize in the Social Sciences by the Council for European Studies at Columbia University. The article, “’A Forgetting for Everyone, by Everyone’? Spain’s Memory Laws and the Rise of the European Community of Memory, 1977–2007,” was published in The Journal of Modern History in 2022. Drs. Walter L. Adamson and Astrid M. Eckert advised Fuentes’s doctoral work, including a 2015 graduate paper in which she first conducted the research and analysis that would culminate in the 2022 article. Read the abstract of this impressive scholarly contribution below. Congratulations, Dr. Fuentes!
“Historians and other scholars of memory have worked extensively on European memory politics, especially around transnational issues such as the Holocaust, as well as on Spanish memory politics, most recently in light of the exhumation of former dictator Francisco Franco. Yet there has been little scholarship to date on how nationally specific incidents, such as the Spanish Civil War and Franco regime, fit into wider trans-European narratives. This article reveals the entanglements between these local and supranational developments by examining the evolution of Spain’s memory laws and discourse, from the 1977 Amnesty Law that followed the end of the Franco regime to the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, in relation to contemporaneous European memorialization patterns. It argues that the shift from a discourse of forgetting in the Amnesty Law to one of commemoration in the Law of Historical Memory is a response to the rise of a European culture of memorialization rather than reflecting an evolution in Spain’s memory regime. By analyzing the development, text, and application of these laws, along with the political and cultural debates surrounding them in Spain and throughout Europe, this article reveals how the 2007 Spanish Law of Historical Memory, despite appearing to espouse European discourses of memorialization and amends-making, perpetuates a system of disremembering that predates most contemporary European memory politics. Ultimately, the article argues that the Law of Historical Memory suppresses the voices of victims of the Franco regime in order to bolster a narrative of Spanish national unity and European belonging.”
Belle Stoddard Tuten (PhD, 1997) recently shared an update about her life and work, along with the same of her husband, Jim Tuten (PhD, 2003). Enjoy her reflection below:
“I have been a faculty member at Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA since my graduation in 1997. Right now, I am Charles A. Dana Professor of History, which I have been since (I think) 2017. I serve as the chair of our department of history and art history. I am the only premodern scholar at my school and try to spread the ancient history and medieval history around as much as I can. My most popular class right now is Medieval Medicine, which counts for our Medical Humanities minor and attracts a lot of STEM students. Ancient Rome runs a close second! Since 2010 I have mostly worked in the history of medicine, although I published a book,Daily Life of Women in Medieval Europe, in 2022 for the Greenwood Press’s imprint on Daily Life. I am considering whether to condense my research on the breast in the Middle Ages into book form.
“Jim Tuten has been at Juniata since 1998. He held an administrative role for some years before moving into the faculty. He is Charles and Shirley Knox Professor of History and has his fingers in tons of pies, including recently publishing a guide book to a local historic railroad (written 80% by students!) and serving as the chair of the Major Fellowships committee. He continues his work in food history, recently speaking in Madeira, Portugal, at a conference on the history of Madeira wine.”
Are you an Emory History alumnus? Please send us updates on your life and work!
