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Carol Anderson on COVID-19 and Voter Suppression in ‘Time’

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Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has written an article in Time titled  “Republicans Could Use the Coronavirus to Suppress Votes Across the Country. This Week We Got a Preview.” Anderson’s piece examines how stay-at-home orders prompted by COVID-19 could lead to the disenfranchisement of voters in primary elections and may portend the same for the general election in November. Anderson is the author, most recently, of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was published by Bloomsbury and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in Non-fiction and a National Book Award Longlist finalist in Non-fiction.

 

 

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Ashley Parcells (PhD, ’18) Receives NEH Summer Stipend

Dr. Ashley Parcells, Assistant Professor of History at Jacksonville State University, has received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The support will allow Parcells to complete interviews and two chapters for a book on apartheid and sovereignty in KwaZulu, South Africa. Her project is titled “Ethnicity, State-Building, and the Making of Apartheid, ca. 1951 to 1994.” Parcells completed her doctorate in 2018, with Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor and Director of the Institute of African Studies, serving as her primary dissertation adviser.

 

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Four History Majors Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa

Congratulations to the four history majors inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society this spring. They are Melanie Dunn, Cameron Katz, Yaza Sarieh, and Jesse Steinman. Sarieh and Steinman are seniors; Dunn and Katz are both juniors. The Gamma Chapter of Georgia was established at Emory University on April 5th, 1929, by the authority of the Sixteenth National Council of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. The initiation ceremony, originally slated for the first week of April 2020, has been postponed to the fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Phi Beta Kappa Society of Georgia Recognizes Eckert and Suh for Teaching Excellence

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The Gamma Chapter of Georgia of the Phi Beta Kappa Society has recognized two Emory History Department faculty members for teaching excellence: Dr. Astrid M. Eckert, Associate Professor, and Dr. Chris Suh, Assistant Professor. Eckert is a historian of modern Europe and modern Germany, with teaching interests that cover German and European history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A few of her recent courses include “Borderlands in History,” “Modern Germany,” and “Nazi Medicine and Biology.” Suh, who joined the faculty last fall, is a historian of race, ethnicity, and inequality, specializing in the United States’ engagement with the Pacific World and Asian migration to the United States. His courses at Emory thus far have included “Transpacific Lives,” “Sounds of the Century,” and “Asian American History.”

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Amsterdam UP Releases ‘Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550,’ Co-Edited by Sharon T. Strocchia

Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, co-edited a newly-published volume of essays with Dr. Sara Ritchey, Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee. Titled Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550, the collection’s 13 essays offer new understandings about women healers and bodywork in societies of the later medieval and Renaissance eras, a formative period in the history of healthcare and medicine. Read the full blurb from Amsterdam University Press below and find more information at Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

This path-breaking collection offers an integrative model for understanding health and healing in Europe and the Mediterranean from 1250 to 1550. By foregrounding gender as an organizing principle of healthcare, the contributors challenge traditional binaries that ahistorically separate care from cure, medicine from religion, and domestic healing from fee-for-service medical exchanges. The essays collected here illuminate previously hidden and undervalued forms of healthcare and varieties of body knowledge produced and transmitted outside the traditional settings of university, guild, and academy. They draw on non-traditional sources — vernacular regimens, oral communications, religious and legal sources, images and objects — to reveal additional locations for producing body knowledge in households, religious communities, hospices, and public markets. Emphasizing cross-confessional and multilinguistic exchange, the essays also reveal the multiple pathways for knowledge transfer in these centuries. Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 provides a synoptic view of how gender and cross-cultural exchange shaped medical theory and practice in later medieval and Renaissance societies.

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Hannah Abrahamson Wins AHA’s Beveridge Research Grant

4th-year doctoral student Hannah Abrahamson was recently awarded a Beveridge Research Grant from the American Historical Association. Abrahamson is a historian of colonial Mexico writing a dissertation entitled, “Women of the Encomienda: Households and Dependents in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Yucatan, Mexico.” The Beveridge grant supports research in the history of the Western Hemisphere (the United States, Canada, and Latin America).

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Channelle Russell Receives Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship

Congratulations to Channelle Russell on winning a Mellon Mays Undergraduate fellowship. Russell is a sophomore with a joint major in History and English, concentrating in African Atlantic history and literature, with a minor in Anthropology. Her Mellon Mays research project is tentatively titled “Unspooling Venus: Intimacy, Space, and Memory in 1700s Brazil” and explores the life of 18th-century enslaved woman Xica da Silva, whose historical enslavement became a cultural monument in contemporary Brazilian media. Russell’s interest in the Atlantic stems largely from a Fall 2018 freshman seminar she took with Dr. Adriana Chira, “Radicals and Revolution in the Caribbean.” Her interest in archival work took root in Dr. Maria Montalvo’s current “North American Slave Revolts” course. Beyond being a College undergrad, Russell is interested in knowledge production and media and plans to further explore the intersections of narrative formation and history in graduate school.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program works to increase the number of underrepresented minority students pursuing doctoral degrees in the arts and sciences and, in doing so, to create more diverse faculties on university campuses in the United States and South Africa. Emory has had comprehensive participation in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program for more than 17 years. Read more about the fellowship here.

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Harvard UP Publishes Q&A with Sharon T. Strocchia about “Forgotten Healers”

Harvard University Press recently published a Q&A with Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History, about her newest book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard UP, 2019). The exchange, which was published as part of Women’s History Month, outlines the major themes and historiographic contributions of Strocchia’s monograph. Read the piece on the Harvard UP Blog: “Q&A with Sharon Strocchia.”

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Daniel Thomas (20C), History Major and Fox Center Honors Fellow, Writes About Separatism in Eastern Ukraine

Daniel Thomas, a senior double major in history and international studies, recently wrote a piece about his research on separatism in Eastern Ukraine for the blog of the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory. Thomas is a 2019-’20 Fox Center Humanities Honors Fellow, completing his honors thesis with a regional focus on the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. The thesis draws on archival research and interviews that Thomas conducted in Kyiv in 2019. Associate Professor Matthew Payne is Thomas’ adviser. Read an excerpt from the post on the Fox Center’s blog below along with the full piece: “Neighbors against Neighbors: A historical study of separatist groups and rhetoric in Eastern Ukraine.”

The Fox Center’s generous grant has afforded me both the privilege of working in a tightly-knit epistemic community and the ability to conduct further research into my topic. The lump sum that I received as a part of my fellowship helped fund my interview-collecting over the Winter Break in Kyiv. Hearing the lived experiences of the Donbas’ denizens contributed a great deal to this project. I spoke with refugees and former separatist affiliates who dealt first-hand with the destructive repercussions of Donbasian separatism. Their accounts and lives illustrated that identity is more of a practice in subjectivity than it is an objective truth. Although my interviewees admitted that the separatist cause was rooted in a real problem (the callousness many politicians, both in Eastern and Western Ukraine, had towards the poor), they also admit that the separatists’ cause did little to ameliorate the Donbas’ desperate situation. Instead, it amplified it, displacing millions upon millions of Donbasians from their homeland. Without their insight, this thesis would have been at best a clueless meditation on a “forgotten” conflict…

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Emory History Department Updates in the Context of COVID-19

Emory University will extend spring break until March 22, after which the institution will transition to remote learning for graduate and undergraduate classes. Visit Emory’s COVID-19 page for details about these changes, and please contact History Department faculty and staff via email with individual questions or concerns. History Department staff and faculty will work remotely for the next several weeks.

All History Department seminars, workshops, and book events have been canceled for the remainder of the semester, including the History Department Workshop scheduled for this Friday, March 20, featuring Dr. Thomas D. Rogers and Dr. Jeffrey T. Manuel, and the celebration of Dr. Sharon Strocchia’s recently-published monograph, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, slated for next week. In lieu of the in-person events featuring these works, check out two recent posts about them: