by emoryhistorydept

Welcoming New Graduate Students

The Emory History Department is excited to welcome five new doctoral students to the department in the fall 2025 semester, along with one graduate exchange student from the University of Augsburg, Germany. Read abridged profiles of the new graduate cohort below and follow the links to read their full biographies on the History Department website.

Savanna Courtney-Durrett received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of North Florida. Her research examines African American women’s entrepreneurship and activism in the funeral business during the early twentieth century. Her graduate work will be advised by Drs. Crystal Sanders, Jason Morgan Ward, and Kali Gross

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Maren Fauth is an exchange student from the University of Augsburg, Germany. She received her B.A. in English and American Studies with a minor in Philosophy in 2024 and is currently pursuing a M.A. in North American Studies. Her research interests include women’s history, African American history, and the history of social protest movements. Fauth’s work will be advised by Drs. Astrid M. Eckert and Laura Nenzi.

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Ziying Lin received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Lin studies social history, environmental history, and gender studies, with a particular research interest in the material culture of dowries in Edo Japan. Drs. Laura Nenzi and Julia Bullock will advise her work.

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Mary Elizabeth Marquardt received her A.B. from Princeton University in history and African American studies and her M.A.R. from Yale University. She studies religion, race, and legal history in the U.S. South, with a focus on 20th century interactions between churches and the state. Drs. Joseph Crespino, Mary Dudziak, and Alison Collis Greene will advise Marquardt’s work.

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Yerbol Munai earned a bachelor’s degree in Kazakh Language and Literature and a master’s degree in Turkology from Minzu University of China. He specializes in the modern history of Central Asia, with a focus on the Kazakh and other Central Asian Turkic communities in the early 20th century. Drs. Matthew J. Payne and Hwisang Cho will advise Munai’s work.

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Jayden Trawick-Junta is a native of Portland, OR, and earned his B.A. from Berea College in History and African & African American Studies. He studies race, culture, and sports in the U.S. during the twentieth century, focusing on how Negro League baseball teams interacted with Black communities in their cities. Drs. Carl Suddler and Jason Morgan Ward will advise his work.

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Crespino Offers Historical Perspectives on U.S. Senate in Briefing to Congress

Daniel S. Holt (Senate Historical Office), Joanne B. Freeman (Yale Univ.), Sarah Weicksel (Briefing Moderator & AHA Executive Director), and Joseph Crespino.

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Jimmy Carter Professor of History, recently participated in a Congressional Briefing organized by the American Historical Association (AHA) focused on how the U.S. Senate has changed since its establishment. The briefing took place on Thursday, July 24, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Other presenters included Dr. Joanne B. Freeman (Yale Univ.) and Daniel S. Holt (Senate Historical Office). AHA executive director Sarah Weicksel served as moderator.

The AHA’s Congressional Briefings series seeks to provide Congressional staff members, journalists, and other members of the policy community with the historical context essential to understanding contemporary issues. The sessions are strictly nonpartisan and avoid advancing particular policy prescriptions or legislative agendas.

Crespino and Becca Flikier (C ’17)

While in D.C., Crespino also had the chance to say hello to former History major Becca Flikier, who is now Deputy Chief of Staff for Florida Congresswoman Lois Frankel. Flikier graduated in 2017 with honors, receiving highest honors for her thesis, “The Fall of the Child Savers, The Rise of Juvenile Lockdown, and The Evolution of Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century America.” Her thesis chair was Daniel LaChance. Flikier was also a Political Science minor.

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Crystal R. Sanders Discusses ‘A Forgotten Migration’ on Black Perspectives


Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies and associated faculty in the History Department, was recently interviewed in the publication Black Perspectives. Sanders discusses her most recent book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024), with Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought. A Forgotten Migration has won multiple awards since its release, including the 2025 Pauli Murray Book Prize. Read an excerpt from the interview below and find the full conversation here.

“During the age of Jim Crow, especially, many white people saw educated African Americans as a threat to the racial status quo so there was no enthusiasm or adequate financial appropriation to assist African Americans in pursuing postbaccalaureate degrees. That is why segregation scholarship programs were never funded sufficiently and demand always exceeded supply.“

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Graduate Student Emilie Cunning Receives LBJ Library Moody Research Grant


History graduate student Emilie Cunning has received a Moody Research Grant from the LBJ Presidential Library. She will head to Austin this fall to conduct archival research on transnational protest cultures in the US and UK in the 1960s-1970s. Her dissertation project is tentatively titled “Transnational Protest Cultures: The Anti-War and Black Power Movements in Britain and the United States, 1960-1974.”

Cunning has developed her dissertation project through varied activities over the last year. In the spring semester, she taught a course related to her research titled “US & the Cold War.” In March, she presented her work at the Boston University American Political History Graduate Conference. The paper focused on transnational anti-war networks during the Vietnam era, specifically on the role of “American Exiles” in Britain who formed a persistent source of opposition to the American war in Vietnam while working with British anti-war groups such as the BCPV and CND.

Earlier this summer, Cunning attended BOCA LONGA at University College London. BOCA LONGA is an annual spring workshop that brings together U.S. historians (both faculty and graduate students) from Boston University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, University College London, and Emory. She attended along with History Department graduate student Jessica Locklear, Emory College Senior Associate Dean Joseph Crespino, and Profs. Jason Ward, Daniel LaChance and Carl Suddler.


Cunning will defend her dissertation prospectus this August.

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Doctoral Candidate Olivia Cocking Wins Dissertation Fellowships


Doctoral candidate Olivia Cocking has won two fellowships to support her dissertation, titled “France After Empire: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Rights, 1946 – Present.” The European Union Studies Association awarded Cocking its Ernst Haas Dissertation Fellowship, and Emory’s Laney Graduate School awarded her the Emory University Women’s Club Memorial Fellowship. Cocking is completing research and dissertation write up in Paris. She has presented papers at the Society for the Study of French History conference in Manchester, UK, and the Groupe de recherche sur les orders coloniaux colloquium, in Nantes, France.

Cocking has also received honorable mention for the Edward T. Gargan Prize from the Western Society for French History for her paper “‘Je ne comprends pas pourquoi j’ai perdu tous mes droits’: Migration and Welfare in France After Empire.” She presented the paper at the society’s conference in San Francisco in November 2024.

Profs. Tehila Sasson, Judith Miller (co-directors), and Mariana Candido serve on her dissertation committee. 

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History Department Well Represented in Fox Center’s 2025-26 Fellows Cohort


History Department faculty and students are well represented in the recently-announced 2025-26 cohort of fellows at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Faculty and graduate fellows will conduct research intersecting with this year’s theme, Life/Story, which draws “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.”

Four undergraduate History students will hold Undergraduate Humanities Honors fellowships. These Fellowships support undergraduates as they complete their honors theses, introduce them to the life of the Humanities, and provide a venue for interdisciplinary interchange, mentorship, and conference-style presentation.

View short profiles of the faculty and student fellows below and follow the links to more extended biographies.

Hwisang Cho (Associated Faculty in History) specializes in the cultural, intellectual, and literary history of Korea, comparative textual media, and global written culture. His major work-in-progress is  “Irresistible Fabulation: Moral Imagination and Storytelling in Korean Confucian Tradition.”

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Alejandro Guardado is a 6th year PhD Candidate in the Department of History. His dissertation, “Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn (1968-2000),” examines how Indigenous activists developed political networks to bolster self-determination movements in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

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Leo Raykher is a senior majoring in History. His thesis, titled “Economics, Espionage, and Exile: the Surveilled life of David Drucker, esq.,” examines the life of his great, great uncle David Drucker.

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Thora Jordt is a History and Art History major from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her project examines the artist Alexandra Exter’s contributions as a costume and set designer for theatre and film between 1915 and 1925, with a focus on the 1924 film Aelita: Queen of Mars.

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Daniel Bell is a rising senior from Chicago, Illinois, double-majoring in Economics and History. His thesis project is centered around Herbert Jenkins, Atlanta’s influential twentieth-century police chief.

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Eunjae Thompson is a senior studying Philosophy and Religion with a minor in History. Their honors thesis, titled “Beyond Capture: Blackened Piety & the Politics of Refusal,” will interrogate how the life-writing genre not only illuminates but draws the boundaries of the human condition.

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Remembering James Van Horn Melton (1952-2025)


It is with great sadness that the History Department shares the news of the passing of a beloved colleague and friend, Professor Emeritus of History James (Jamie) Van Horn Melton. Jamie died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home in Atlanta on June 28th.

Jamie touched many people on this campus as a distinguished scholar, generous mentor, inspiring teacher, engaging and supportive colleague, and kind friend. He was born in 1952 in Charlotte, NC, and in 1959, he moved with his parents and two brothers to Chatham, VA. Jamie received his BA in History from Vanderbilt University in 1974 and his PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 1982. During his doctoral studies, he conducted dissertation research in Vienna, Austria as a Fulbright Scholar. After he completed the PhD, he spent two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas, three years as an Assistant Professor at Florida International University, and in 1987 he joined the faculty at Emory. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1990 and Full Professor in 2001. He retired from Emory in 2023.

Jamie left a profound mark as a historian of early modern Europe, Germany, the Enlightenment, and the Atlantic World. He published three single-authored books with Cambridge University Press, two of which garnered national prizes: Absolutism and the Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (1988), The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (2001), and Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Southern Colonial Frontier (2015). His books were translated into German, Spanish, Russian, and Turkish. He also edited or co-edited three scholarly anthologies, published thirty peer-reviewed articles and fifty book reviews, and co-translated a book by an Austrian scholar from German into English. Inspired by his love of opera, he spent his last years at Emory working on a book project focused on the life of an Italian-born librettist who wrote for three of Mozart’s greatest operas. On Jamie’s last day, he was preparing an abstract for a piece based on a keynote address he gave last year in Vienna, which young Austrian scholars had invited him to provide because they considered his first book to be a path-breaking study. It was exciting to see a new generation of scholars inspired by his early work.

Through a remarkable record of service, Jamie left a lasting impact on Emory. He arrived on campus less than a decade after the university received the legendary gift from Robert W. and George Woodruff that transformed it from a regional liberal arts college into a nationally ranked research institution. As a young and ambitious scholar, Jamie was thrilled by the new opportunities that Emory’s expansion presented. At the same time, he and his cohort experienced enormous service burdens as they rolled up their sleeves to help Emory grow. Even among his peer group, Jamie’s contributions stand out. He chaired three departments — History, German Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese — and steered them through challenging times. He also served two terms as Director of Graduate Studies in History, one term as Director of Undergraduate Studies in History, and a three-year term on the College Tenure and Promotion Committee. He chaired twelve faculty search committees across three departments and served as a member of countless others. Outside of Emory, he served as President of the Central European History Society from 2012-2013, chaired five national book prize committees, and sat on numerous editorial boards. These are only some of his most visible service contributions. His ability to give so much time and energy to the communities of which he formed a part while producing field-defining scholarship earned him the deep admiration of colleagues, students, and staff at Emory and beyond.

Jamie brought his whole self to Emory, enriching the lives of those who were lucky enough to work with him. He was warm, funny, passionate, irreverent, and utterly unpretentious. He cared deeply about colleagues, staff, and students, and sought ways to support junior faculty especially. Jamie stood on his principles and lived out his ideals. He was vocal and courageous at key inflection points during his time at Emory, defending faculty governance and publicly supporting contingent faculty, graduate students, and employees. He was a tremendous person, and we will miss him terribly.

Jamie is survived by his wife, Barbara Lawatsch-Melton, his two children, Sarah (Matt Miller) and Peter, his former wife, Donna Walko Melton Provost, and his two brothers Ed (Julie) and Will (Eliza).

– Yanna Yannakakis, Professor and Department Chair

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Kyungtaek Kwon Publishes Article in ‘Russian History’


Recent doctoral program graduate Kyungtaek Kwon has published an article in the journal Russian History. Titled “Inspection journey of K.E. Voroshilov to the Far East (1931),” the article follows the travels of prominent Soviet official K.E. Voroshilov to military and industrial facilities in the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East. Kwon shows that Voroshilov sought to evaluate the process and results of the industrialization and militarization of the USSR in defense preparations.

Kwon completed his graduate work under the advisement of Dr. Matthew J. Payne in 2023. His dissertation was titled, “Identifying the City: Komsomol’sk-na-Amure Transformation from Military Outpost to the City of Youth in the Soviet Far East, 1932-1982.” He has recently been appointed assistant professor in the History Department of Pusan National University.

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Gill’s ‘Labors of Division’ Wins Book Prize


Doctoral program alum Navyug Gill (’14) has received the Henry A. Wallace Award from the Agricultural History Society for his 2024 work, Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab (Stanford UP). The Wallace prize recognizes the best book on agricultural history outside of the United States. The prize committee offered the following appraisal of Labors of Division:

“Navyug Gill’s Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab traces the invention of a peasantry in the context of colonialism and demonstrates how ‘landless laborer’ and ‘landowning peasant’ emerged as vital political, cultural, and economic categories in the making of global capitalism under colonialism. The ambitious book weaves together a wide variety of sources to generate a history that deeply troubles our received understanding of the role of ‘peasants’ and ‘the peasantry’ and the position of agriculture within the history of political economy. In Gill’s capable hands, we must reckon with the surprising idea that modernity was not the death of the peasant, but its site of origin. This book challenges a range of fields in the social sciences and humanities by questioning one of the fundamental categories—the peasant—mobilized at the birth of foundational political and economic theories across the disciplines.”

Gill completed his doctoral work under the advisement of Dr. Gyanendra Pandey, and he is currently Associate Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Liberal Studies at William Paterson University. His scholarly and public writings have appeared in venues such as Past and Present, the Journal of Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Outlook, Al Jazeera, Scroll, the Law and Political Economy Project, Borderlines and Trolley Times.

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Ursula Rall Awarded Fellowship at the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania


Doctoral student Ursula Rall has won a fellowship for at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is working on her dissertation, entitled “Forging Inter-Urban Communities: Spatial Mobilities and Social Networks of Women of African Descent in New Spain, 1580-1740.” Drawing on research in Spain and Mexico, the project explores how the social networks that Black women formed across urban centers were key to the socioeconomic mobility of the Black Mexican population during the seventeenth century. She argues that Afro-descended women had a sense of a shared racialized and gendered community, forming close ties and financial networks that improved their social and material lives.

Rall’s research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Grant, the American Historical Association, the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, the Conference on Latin American History, and Emory University’s Halle Institute for Global Research. Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Professor and Department Chair, is Rall’s faculty advisor.