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Faculty Reports

Walter Adamson writes:

Some historians enjoy thinking theoretically about the nature of their craft; others (probably most) prefer just to use their existing toolkits to address their problems of choice. For better or worse, I am an historian of the first variety. So I recently read William Sewell, Logics of History, which offers a challenging but also, in part at least, personal (autobiographical) take on where the profession is and ought to be today. One of his ideas, which I found particularly intriguing, is that we might define an historical “event” not in the usual way (something that happened) but in a restricted way (that rare subclass of happenings that significantly transforms structures of experience). If we look at events in this way, then historical time divides into two subspecies: “normal” times in which social norms, cultural practices, and ways of life change slowly if at all and remain predictable, and “eventful times” like the French Revolution, World War I, or the Depression in which the “rules of the game” get at least in part suspended and at least some important structures break apart. When I taught my twentieth-century intellectual history class this past spring, it occurred to me that a philosophy like existentialism shows its origin in an eventful time, and gets replaced by Levi-Straussian structuralism when the postwar world appears fully restructured. And a few months earlier in fall 2008 – as I (along with everyone else) saw my retirement savings plummet as economic hell broke loose – I wondered if historians would ultimately conclude that this was the beginning of an eventful time. I guess only time will tell. Meanwhile we can only hope that this whatever-it-is is short-lived.

Tonio Andrade writes:

The first course I taught at Emory, seven years ago, was a freshman seminar about pirates in world history. My students were enthusiastic and mischievous. One of them organized pirate raids and brought his booty to the classroom, proposing that each class should begin with a stolen-item show-and-tell. I laughed nervously and tried to steer the discussion back to ocean currents.

As I taught the course, I realized that my own research had unearthed material about Chinese pirates that I had never used. I put together an article about the Dutch East India Company’s interactions with pirates of the China Seas, sent it off to the Journal of World History, and thought that was the end of it. But the article took on a life of its own. It was praised and blogged about and reprinted in Pirate Magazine. A literary agent contacted me and asked whether I might be interested in proposing a book on the topic. I demurred, feeling that the story was not rich enough for a whole book. Besides, I was plenty busy with other writing projects.

But the idea did not go away. I began to realize that the agent had spotted the germ of something important. I began investigating the sources and found them exceptionally rich, with actual dialogue (rare in historical sources), vivid descriptions, and a great cast of characters full of scandal and intrigue. Most important of all, I realized that the history of these Chinese pirates goes to the heart of the question that animates my scholarly life: Why did Europeans rather than Turks, or Indians, or Malays, or Chinese create the world’s first global empires?

So I have been working on a book tentatively called Lost Colony: How a Chinese Pirate Defeated The Dutch East India Company and Captured Taiwan. This past year I conducted research in Chinese and European sources, getting to know the various characters and, equally importantly, the geography in which the story takes place so that I can try to bring the era alive on the page. Research has taken me from the formation of sand dunes to the use of gongs in Chinese military drills. You never know where history will lead you. And you never know what’s going to happen when you teach Emory students about pirates.

David Eltis writes:

The Voyages database (www.slavevoyages.org) was launched in December, 2008 with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. A few months earlier – in August – Yale University Press published a book of essays all of which drew on the voyage records and estimates that form the core of this web site. The book is Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Most of the contributors are, or have been, associated with Emory as graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, visiting professors, or faculty. In the pipeline, also from Yale UP and also drawing on the database, is An Atlas of the Slave Trade. Publication of this is scheduled for early next year. Apart from these activities there was a co-authored essay in the American Historical Review in December, 2007 and another in Civil War History which won the John T. Hubbell Prize for best article in the journal for 2008. Despite the outside funding these projects received, they could not have happened without the support of so many parts of the university – Emory College, the Library, the Graduate School and the Provost’s Office.

As all this suggests, the new web site and its spin-offs have rather dominated my year. Nevertheless in January a group of us began another NEH funded project which tracks individual Africans who were caught up in the slave trade rather than the vessels on which they were forced to sail. The basis of this project is the personal records of 67,000 people including their African names and origins. We expect to have a pilot project operational by the end of the summer. As with Voyages, several visiting professors and post-doctoral students will be coming to Emory to work on the project over the next two years. The goal here is to create a profile of the peoples and regions on which the slave trade drew as opposed to tracking the transoceanic routes followed by the slave vessels when they left Africa.

Eric Goldstein writes:

From November 1-3, 2008, I organized and chaired the 33rd Annual Conference of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, hosted by Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. The conference, which focused on the theme “Jews in a Changing South,” drew over 150 scholars, students and laypeople with a program of panel sessions, keynote addresses, and cultural events. A special feature of the conference was a series of programs and an exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Atlanta’s Hebrew Benevolent Congregation (“The Temple”) by white supremacists and exploring the role of the congregation’s rabbi, Jacob M. Rothschild, in the civil rights movement.

In October 2008, I presented a paper titled, “A Childless Language: Yiddish and the Problem of ‘Youth’ in the 1920s and 1930s” at a special conference on Youth and American Jewish Cultural Change at the Center for Jewish History in New York. In December 2008, I chaired a roundtable at the annual meeting of the Association of Jewish Studies on “Black Jewish Relations: Multiple Perspectives and the State of the Field.” In March 2009, I spoke on his book, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (2006) to Princeton University’s seminar on American Religious History and in May 2009 I presented a paper titled, “Above Compromise? Monthly Journals and the Politics of Hierarchy in American Yiddish Culture, 1892-1912,” at a special conference on Yiddish print culture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Aside from my forthcoming book on Jewish immigrants and reading, I am working on a new book that presents a microhistory of a Lithuanian shtetl, a small town typical of Jewish settlement in eastern Europe before the turn of the last century. The book, which will be the first social history of this type of settlement based on archival research and spanning the period between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, will also examine the experience of global Jewish migration—to the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Palestine and South Africa—through the lens of this one community. I conducted a successful research trip to Vilnius, Kaunas, and Klaipeda, Lithuania, to work on this project for two weeks during June 2009. Finally, along with coauthor Deborah Weiner and with the support of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, I have begun work on a two-year project to write a comprehensive history of the Jews of Baltimore. In June 2009 I delivered a talk at the museum’s annual meeting on “Big Deal? Why Baltimore Jews Matter,” which provided an overview of the project.

I have completed my second year as editor of the scholarly journal, American Jewish History, which is the oldest journal in the field of American ethnic history and is published quarterly by the American Jewish Historical Society and the Johns Hopkins University Press. During the coming year, I will serve as director of Emory’s Graduate Program in Jewish Studies.

Leslie Harris writes:

I stepped down as Chair of the Department of African American Studies this year, and returned to a fuller teaching schedule, which I really enjoyed! I continue to serve as Director of the Transforming Community Project, which encourages members of the Emory community to discuss the history of race relations in the University and to work to improve communication across lines of race and hierarchy. To date, over 1500 staff, faculty and students have participated in semester-long Community Dialogues on the history of race at Emory. The Project has been supported by Emory University Strategic Plan funds, and by two generous grants from The Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues Initiative. I have also begun to develop a new body of research on New Orleans. As a native of the city, I have begun work on a family history of life in twentieth-century New Orleans. As a result of this work, I was invited to give the inaugural Alexander F. Carson Lecture at Holy Cross College. I am also developing a set of inter-related digital projects on the city. One project will seek to recover and preserve historical records threatened with extinction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A second project, “New Orleans After Katrina,” will use digital tools to critically examine and assess the large body of materials being produced by scholars and the general public in the wake of the 2005 hurricane season. I was awarded an Emory University Collaborative Grant this spring to support the latter project.

Jeffrey Lesser writes:

This has been a fascinating academic year. My administrative work as Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies has focused on a self-study and external review and on working through the many challenges that the economic crisis has brought to all in the academy. TIJS continues to work closely with the History Department, notably on Miriam Bodian’s lecture in conjunction with the Vann Seminar in Pre-Modern European History.

The Portuguese version (heavily revised from the U.S. one) of A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy was published by Editora Paz e Terra (São Paulo) and I co-edited the volume Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans (University of New Mexico Press)with Raanan Rein, who will be spending the Fall, 2009 semester at Emory as Fox Center for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor.

This year I taught an entirely redesigned introductory course on modern Latin American history. Some of the highlights in 2009 were a film series and a class project analyzing Albert Einstein’s correspondence with Latin American politicians over places for refugees from Nazism.

One of the pleasures of teaching is seeing your students do well. I was thrilled that one of my undergraduate advisees, Felice Physioc, decided to move to Argentina after graduation. Two of Emory’s Ph.D. students in Latin American History, Rafael Ioris and Fabricio Prado, completed their dissertations and won excellent tenure track jobs. Another, Cari Williams, won a Fulbright grant and will spend this year in Brazil.

Judith Miller writes:

I am looking forward to spending the 2009-2010 year in Augsburg, teaching cultural history as part of our department’s Augsburg exchange program. Prof. Silvia Serena Tschopp will teach in my place at Emory. In the meantime, I will be in Milan for a conference in May 2009 and then in Paris for an intense summer of work in the Louvre, the Bibliothèque nationale and the Archives nationales. I will be working hard on my book, “The Stoic Voice of the Late French Revolution, 1795-1804.” It is difficult to believe that I will be away for nearly 15 months, but very exciting also. I am hoping to get to Munich and Vienna often for opera and already have a ticket for La Scala in Milan.

Sharon Strocchia writes:

This year was marked by a major professional milestone. My book, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, was officially accepted for publication by Johns Hopkins University Press and will be published in October 2009. In their final stages, academic books go through a fascinating process that has occupied me over the last number of months: choosing the cover image; writing promotional copy; checking proofs; compiling the index. Even though at times it has seemed that the book will never be done, I’m grateful that Hopkins Press allows its authors such control over the finished product. In between these tasks, I’ve launched a new research project in earnest, which builds on my knowledge of Italian Renaissance convents but moves in a new direction. I am interested in examining the roles of religious women as both patients and practitioners of the healing arts between 1500 and 1650. By setting nuns’ medical agency, their health histories, and their subjective responses to illness and disability within shifting frames of reference—the growth of the state, Counter-Reformation piety, the rise of professional medicine—I hope to shed new light on the gendering of early modern medical practice and move the study of women’s health beyond issues of reproduction.

Brian Vick writes:

After several years teaching European history at the University of Sheffield in England and at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I joined the faculty here at Emory this past fall and have since been settling in and enjoying the Emory experience. In the fall I taught a survey of The Formation of Modern Europe and a research seminar on the period of the French Revolution in Britain and Germany. Another highlight of the year was teaching in the Honors Seminar this spring. My previous published work has focused on the development of nationalism, liberalism, historicism, and ideas of race, in several articles and in my first book, Defining Germany: the 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Harvard University Press, 2002).

My current research explores problems of European culture and political culture at the Congress of Vienna, including the political engagement of women, the development of liberal and conservative politics, and the role of religious revival. This work also sounds the cultural and political meanings of the celebratory spectacle and display surrounding the defeat of Napoleon and the return of peace at the close of the Napoleonic wars. The resultant book will help to reassess the nature and development of European culture and political culture in their transition between the revolutionary era and the nineteenth century. In addition, I am finishing an article on the German reception of Roman antiquity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, against the background of existing scholarship emphasizing only German love of the Greeks and rejection of the Romans. I presented earlier versions of this work at Harvard and as a Fellow in the European Studies Seminar here at Emory this past fall.



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Faculty Reports Student Awards and Accolades Faculty Reports Walter Adamson writes: Some historians enjoy thinking theoretically about the nature of their craft; others (probably most) prefer just to use their existing toolkits to address their problems of choice. For better or worse, I am an historian of the first variety. So I recently read William Sewell, Logics of History, which offers a challenging but also, in part at least, personal (autobiographical) take on where the profession is and ought to be today. One of his ideas, which I found particularly intriguing, is that we might define an historical “event” not in the usual way (something that happened) but in a restricted way (that rare subclass of happenings that significantly transforms structures of experience). If we look at events in this way, then historical time divides into two subspecies: “normal” times in which social norms, cultural practices, and ways of life change slowly if at all and remain predictable, and “eventful times” like the French Revolution, World War I, or the Depression in which the “rules of the game” get at least in part suspended and at least some important structures break apart. When I taught my twentieth-century intellectual history class this past spring, it occurred to me that a philosophy like existentialism shows its origin in an eventful time, and gets replaced by Levi-Straussian structuralism when the postwar world appears fully restructured. And a few months earlier in fall 2008 – as I (along with everyone else) saw my retirement savings plummet as economic hell broke loose – I wondered if historians would ultimately conclude that this was the beginning of an eventful time. I guess only time will tell. Meanwhile we can only hope that this whatever-it-is is short-lived. Tonio Andrade writes: The first course I taught at Emory, seven years ago, was a freshman seminar about pirates in world history. My students were enthusiastic and mischievous. One of them organized pirate raids and brought his booty to the classroom, proposing that each class should begin with a stolen-item show-and-tell. I laughed nervously and tried to steer the discussion back to ocean currents. As I taught the course, I realized that my own research had unearthed material about Chinese pirates that I had never used. I put together an article about the Dutch East India Company’s interactions with pirates of the China Seas, sent it off to the Journal of World History, and thought that was the end of it. But the article took on a life of its own. It was praised and blogged about and reprinted in Pirate Magazine. A literary agent contacted me and asked whether I might be interested in proposing a book on the topic. I demurred, feeling that the story was not rich enough for a whole book. Besides, I was plenty busy with other writing projects. But the idea did not go away. I began to realize that the agent had spotted the germ of something important. I began investigating the sources and found them exceptionally rich, with actual dialogue (rare in historical sources), vivid descriptions, and a great cast of characters full of scandal and intrigue. Most important of all, I realized that the history of these Chinese pirates goes to the heart of the question that animates my scholarly life: Why did Europeans rather than Turks, or Indians, or Malays, or Chinese create the world’s first global empires? So I have been working on a book tentatively called Lost Colony: How a Chinese Pirate Defeated The Dutch East India Company and Captured Taiwan. This past year I conducted research in Chinese and European sources, getting to know the various characters and, equally importantly, the geography in which the story takes place so that I can try to bring the era alive on the page. Research has taken me from the formation of sand dunes to the use of gongs in Chinese military drills. You never know where history will lead you. And you never know what’s going to happen when you teach Emory students about pirates. David Eltis writes: The Voyages database (www.slavevoyages.org) was launched in December, 2008 with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. A few months earlier – in August – Yale University Press published a book of essays all of which drew on the voyage records and estimates that form the core of this web site. The book is Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Most of the contributors are, or have been, associated with Emory as graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, visiting professors, or faculty. In the pipeline, also from Yale UP and also drawing on the database, is An Atlas of the Slave Trade. Publication of this is scheduled for early next year. Apart from these activities there was a co-authored essay in the American Historical Review in December, 2007 and another in Civil War History which won the John T. Hubbell Prize for best article in the journal for 2008. Despite the outside funding these projects received, they could not have happened without the support of so many parts of the university – Emory College, the Library, the Graduate School and the Provost’s Office. As all this suggests, the new web site and its spin-offs have rather dominated my year. Nevertheless in January a group of us began another NEH funded project which tracks individual Africans who were caught up in the slave trade rather than the vessels on which they were forced to sail. The basis of this project is the personal records of 67,000 people including their African names and origins. We expect to have a pilot project operational by the end of the summer. As with Voyages, several visiting professors and post-doctoral students will be coming to Emory to work on the project over the next two years. The goal here is to create a profile of the peoples and regions on which the slave trade drew as opposed to tracking the transoceanic routes followed by the slave vessels when they left Africa. Eric Goldstein writes: From November 1-3, 2008, I organized and chaired the 33rd Annual Conference of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, hosted by Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. The conference, which focused on the theme “Jews in a Changing South,” drew over 150 scholars, students and laypeople with a program of panel sessions, keynote addresses, and cultural events. A special feature of the conference was a series of programs and an exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Atlanta’s Hebrew Benevolent Congregation (“The Temple”) by white supremacists and exploring the role of the congregation’s rabbi, Jacob M. Rothschild, in the civil rights movement. In October 2008, I presented a paper titled, “A Childless Language: Yiddish and the Problem of ‘Youth’ in the 1920s and 1930s” at a special conference on Youth and American Jewish Cultural Change at the Center for Jewish History in New York. In December 2008, I chaired a roundtable at the annual meeting of the Association of Jewish Studies on “Black Jewish Relations: Multiple Perspectives and the State of the Field.” In March 2009, I spoke on his book, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (2006) to Princeton University’s seminar on American Religious History and in May 2009 I presented a paper titled, “Above Compromise? Monthly Journals and the Politics of Hierarchy in American Yiddish Culture, 1892-1912,” at a special conference on Yiddish print culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. Aside from my forthcoming book on Jewish immigrants and reading, I am working on a new book that presents a microhistory of a Lithuanian shtetl, a small town typical of Jewish settlement in eastern Europe before the turn of the last century. The book, which will be the first social history of this type of settlement based on archival research and spanning the period between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, will also examine the experience of global Jewish migration—to the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Palestine and South Africa—through the lens of this one community. I conducted a successful research trip to Vilnius, Kaunas, and Klaipeda, Lithuania, to work on this project for two weeks during June 2009. Finally, along with coauthor Deborah Weiner and with the support of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, I have begun work on a two-year project to write a comprehensive history of the Jews of Baltimore. In June 2009 I delivered a talk at the museum’s annual meeting on “Big Deal? Why Baltimore Jews Matter,” which provided an overview of the project. I have completed my second year as editor of the scholarly journal, American Jewish History, which is the oldest journal in the field of American ethnic history and is published quarterly by the American Jewish Historical Society and the Johns Hopkins University Press. During the coming year, I will serve as director of Emory’s Graduate Program in Jewish Studies. Leslie Harris writes: I stepped down as Chair of the Department of African American Studies this year, and returned to a fuller teaching schedule, which I really enjoyed! I continue to serve as Director of the Transforming Community Project, which encourages members of the Emory community to discuss the history of race relations in the University and to work to improve communication across lines of race and hierarchy. To date, over 1500 staff, faculty and students have participated in semester-long Community Dialogues on the history of race at Emory. The Project has been supported by Emory University Strategic Plan funds, and by two generous grants from The Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues Initiative. I have also begun to develop a new body of research on New Orleans. As a native of the city, I have begun work on a family history of life in twentieth-century New Orleans. As a result of this work, I was invited to give the inaugural Alexander F. Carson Lecture at Holy Cross College. I am also developing a set of inter-related digital projects on the city. One project will seek to recover and preserve historical records threatened with extinction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A second project, “New Orleans After Katrina,” will use digital tools to critically examine and assess the large body of materials being produced by scholars and the general public in the wake of the 2005 hurricane season. I was awarded an Emory University Collaborative Grant this spring to support the latter project. Jeffrey Lesser writes: This has been a fascinating academic year. My administrative work as Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies has focused on a self-study and external review and on working through the many challenges that the economic crisis has brought to all in the academy. TIJS continues to work closely with the History Department, notably on Miriam Bodian’s lecture in conjunction with the Vann Seminar in Pre-Modern European History. The Portuguese version (heavily revised from the U.S. one) of A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy was published by Editora Paz e Terra (São Paulo) and I co-edited the volume Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans (University of New Mexico Press)with Raanan Rein, who will be spending the Fall, 2009 semester at Emory as Fox Center for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor. This year I taught an entirely redesigned introductory course on modern Latin American history. Some of the highlights in 2009 were a film series and a class project analyzing Albert Einstein’s correspondence with Latin American politicians over places for refugees from Nazism. One of the pleasures of teaching is seeing your students do well. I was thrilled that one of my undergraduate advisees, Felice Physioc, decided to move to Argentina after graduation. Two of Emory’s Ph.D. students in Latin American History, Rafael Ioris and Fabricio Prado, completed their dissertations and won excellent tenure track jobs. Another, Cari Williams, won a Fulbright grant and will spend this year in Brazil. Judith Miller writes: I am looking forward to spending the 2009-2010 year in Augsburg, teaching cultural history as part of our department’s Augsburg exchange program. Prof. Silvia Serena Tschopp will teach in my place at Emory. In the meantime, I will be in Milan for a conference in May 2009 and then in Paris for an intense summer of work in the Louvre, the Bibliothèque nationale and the Archives nationales. I will be working hard on my book, “The Stoic Voice of the Late French Revolution, 1795-1804.” It is difficult to believe that I will be away for nearly 15 months, but very exciting also. I am hoping to get to Munich and Vienna often for opera and already have a ticket for La Scala in Milan. Sharon Strocchia writes: This year was marked by a major professional milestone. My book, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, was officially accepted for publication by Johns Hopkins University Press and will be published in October 2009. In their final stages, academic books go through a fascinating process that has occupied me over the last number of months: choosing the cover image; writing promotional copy; checking proofs; compiling the index. Even though at times it has seemed that the book will never be done, I’m grateful that Hopkins Press allows its authors such control over the finished product. In between these tasks, I’ve launched a new research project in earnest, which builds on my knowledge of Italian Renaissance convents but moves in a new direction. I am interested in examining the roles of religious women as both patients and practitioners of the healing arts between 1500 and 1650. By setting nuns’ medical agency, their health histories, and their subjective responses to illness and disability within shifting frames of reference—the growth of the state, Counter-Reformation piety, the rise of professional medicine—I hope to shed new light on the gendering of early modern medical practice and move the study of women’s health beyond issues of reproduction. Brian Vick writes: After several years teaching European history at the University of Sheffield in England and at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I joined the faculty here at Emory this past fall and have since been settling in and enjoying the Emory experience. In the fall I taught a survey of The Formation of Modern Europe and a research seminar on the period of the French Revolution in Britain and Germany. Another highlight of the year was teaching in the Honors Seminar this spring. My previous published work has focused on the development of nationalism, liberalism, historicism, and ideas of race, in several articles and in my first book, Defining Germany: the 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Harvard University Press, 2002). My current research explores problems of European culture and political culture at the Congress of Vienna, including the political engagement of women, the development of liberal and conservative politics, and the role of religious revival. This work also sounds the cultural and political meanings of the celebratory spectacle and display surrounding the defeat of Napoleon and the return of peace at the close of the Napoleonic wars. The resultant book will help to reassess the nature and development of European culture and political culture in their transition between the revolutionary era and the nineteenth century. In addition, I am finishing an article on the German reception of Roman antiquity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, against the background of existing scholarship emphasizing only German love of the Greeks and rejection of the Romans. I presented earlier versions of this work at Harvard and as a Fellow in the European Studies Seminar here at Emory this past fall.

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