The Emory News Center recently featured honors won by two History Department faculty members. The article highlights Associate Professor Astrid M. Eckert‘s West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Economy, Culture & Environment in the Borderlands (Oxford UP, 2019), which has won awards from the Central European History Society, the German Studies Association, and the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. In addition, the Emory Report highlights Professor Sharon Strocchia‘s Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, which was awarded the Marraro Prize by the Society for Italian Historical Studies. Read about other faculty and staff awards from across the Emory campus: “Acclaim: Recent honors for Emory faculty and staff.”
Emory News Center Features ‘Slave Voyages’ Digital Memorial
The Emory News Center recently featured the Slave Voyages project among initiatives at Emory making an impact. The article discusses the expansion and updating of the digital memorial over the last few years, including through a $300,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2018. Initiated by Dr. David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus, Emory faculty and alumni – including Alex Borucki (PhD, 2011), Daniel Domingues da Silva (PhD, 2011), Jane Hooper (PhD, 2010), Nafees Khan (PhD, 2013), and Allen Tullos (Professor and Co-Director of Emory Center for Digital Scholarship) – continue to constitute the core of the Voyages team. Read the full article here: “Documenting Slave Voyages.”
Lesser Research Collective Publishes Article in ‘Health Education & Behavior’
Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Learning, has published an article in the journal Health Education & Behavior with other members of the Lesser Research Collective, including Emory’s Emily S. Pingel, MPH (Sociology) and Alexandra Llovet. Read the abstract below along with the full article: “Committing to Continuity: Primary Care Practices During COVID-19 in an Urban Brazilian Neighborhood.”
“Decreased engagement in preventive services, including vaccination, during the COVID-19 pandemic represents a grave threat to global health. We use the case of the Bom Retiro Public Health Clinic in São Paulo, Brazil, to underscore how continuity of care is not only feasible, but a crucial part of health as a human right. The long-standing relationship between the clinic and neighborhood residents has facilitated ongoing management of physical and mental health conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the clinic’s history of confronting infectious diseases has equipped it to adapt preventive services to meet patients’ needs during the pandemic. Our academic–community partnership used a multidisciplinary approach, relying on analysis of historical data, ethnographic data, and direct clinical experience. We identify specific prevention strategies alongside areas for improvement. We conclude that the clinic serves as a model for continuity of care in urban settings during a pandemic.“
Candido and Jones to Discuss ‘African Women in the Atlantic World’ via #Slaveryarchive Book Club
Join the #Slaveryarchive Book Club on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, 5pm EST for a conversation with Dr. Mariana P. Candido, Associate Professor of History, and Adam Jones (University of Leipzig) about their book African Women in the Atlantic World: Property, Vulnerability & Mobility, 1660-1880 (Cambridge UP, 2019). Register at: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMof-moqDorEtPFVs8cN9LnBF2u6J2z2GQm.
Michael Camp (PhD, ’17) Urges Biden Administration to Restore Endangered Species Act in ‘SLATE’ Article
Dr. Michael Camp (PhD, ’17), assistant professor and political papers archivist at the University of West Georgia, recently published an article for SLATE urging the incoming Biden administration to restore the Endangered Species Act. Camp is an environmental historian who published his first book, Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia after the 1973 Oil Embargo, with the University of Pittsburg Press in 2019. Read an excerpt of the SLATE piece below along with the full article: “The Biden Administration Should Restore the Endangered Species Act to Full Strength.”
“As written, the ESA is a robust law with strong protections for endangered species, and doing away with the Trump changes would return the law’s impressive power to its previous state.“
Eckert’s ‘West Germany and the Iron Curtain’ Wins Hans Rosenberg Book Prize
Congratulations to Dr. Astrid M. Eckert, whose book West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands (Oxford, 2019) has won the 2019 Hans Rosenberg Book Prize of the Central European History Society. The prize is awarded to the best book in the field published by a North American resident in 2019. The committee’s appreciation for the book begins with the following praise: “Like a landscape, this book opens the eye and expands the horizon with every chapter, offering new vantage points, unexpected turns, and hidden depths.” The Rosenberg Prize is the third awarded to Eckert’s West Germany and the Iron Curtain, following the 2020 DAAD/GSA Book Prize and the 2020 Smith Award by the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association.
Dr. Walter C. Rucker, “The Long Hauler,” Featured in Emory News Centers’ Stories of Resolve and Resilience
Dr. Walter C. Rucker, Professor of History, was recently featured in the Emory News Center’s series on stories of resilience and resolve in the face of COVID-19. Rucker describes his experience contracting COVID-19 last year and the lingering effects of the illness. He also discusses how he and his students, some of whose families have also been hit by the illness, have continued to forge a learning community. Watch the interview below and read similar stories from around Emory’s campus: “Our Stories of Resolve and Resilience.”
LaChance Interviewed by ‘Le Devoir’ on Trump’s Embrace of Death Penalty
Dr. Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor and Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History, 2020-23, gave an interview to the Quebec newspaper Le Devoir on the Trump administration’s last-minute push to carry out executions in its final months. LaChance is a legal scholar working at the intersection of American legal and cultural history, criminology, and literary studies. His first book is Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Read an excerpt below along with the full article.
“The Trump administration enthusiastically embraced the death penalty, summarizes Historian Daniel LaChance, who teaches at Emory University Atlanta, Georgia, in an interview with Le Devoir. ‘In this respect, you can even say that Donald Trump is the deadliest president since the nineteenth century. His provocative support for the death penalty was a key part of his Make America Great Again platform.’ And obviously, he intends to take his project to the end.”
Price Quoted in ‘The Atlantic’ Article on Quarantine Practices and Pressures
Dr. Polly J. Price, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Professor of Global Health, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was recently quoted in an article in The Atlantic titled “The Real Reason Americans Aren’t Quarantining.” The piece examines how many residents of the U.S. are not able to quarantine in the midst of COVID-19 because of economic and labor pressures. Read an excerpt from the piece below along with the full article.
Conflicts over remote work and leave are the most common type of COVID-19 employment litigation in the U.S., according to a database compiled by the law firm Fisher Phillips. “We don’t really pay people to stay at home to quarantine,” Polly Price, a global-health professor at Emory University, says. But that’s exactly the problem: In a study in Israel, people were more likely to quarantine after exposure to COVID-19 if they were paid during their isolation.
Suddler Participates in Schomburg Center’s Conversations in Black Freedom Studies Series
Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor of History, recently participated in conversation hosted by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Titled “Resisting Carceral Cities: Prisons, Police & Punishment in Perspective,” the event centered on the rise of prisons and police and resistance to them in historical perspective. Suddler was joined by Garrett Felber (The University of Mississippi), author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement and the Carceral State (UNC Press, 2020), and Kelly Lytle Hernandez (UCLA), author of City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (UNC Press, 2017). Suddler is the author of Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York University Press, 2019). Read more about the event here.