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The Ph.D. in History at Emory University
The Ph.D. in History at Emory University
The Ph.D. in History at Emory University
Among the cross-cutting branches of study in which our faculty have strength and expertise
are:
Race, Subalternity, and Difference (including differences of gender, ethnicity, and class)
Jewish History
The geographic and chronological areas of faculty strength include: African History, Ancient
History, Asian History, Early Modern and Modern European History, Jewish History, Colonial
Page | 2 and Modern Latin American History, and the United States.
Besides the financial support they receive, Ph.D. candidates in History benefit from a lively
intellectual community. Talks by visiting speakers, locally-based conferences, annual
lectureships, and several ongoing colloquium series are all open to graduate students. Acting
on their own, History graduate students have formed assorted reading groups and participate
in the Graduate History Society. The latter organization serves as liaison between the graduate
study body, the Department, and the University. It participates in our student recruitment
weekend each spring and maintains an impressive ongoing website
FACULTY
Patrick N. Allitt
EMORY PHD HISTORY
Department of History
Biography
Email: jcrespi@emory.edu
Biography
Crespino is a historian of the twentieth century United States, with expertise in the political
history of post-World War II America. His published work has examined the intersections of
region, race and religion in American politics in the second half of the twentieth century. The
argument that animates both of his books, as well as an edited collection, is the notion that
the struggles in the American South over race and modernization in the twentieth century
should not be viewed in isolation, but rather as part of a broader series of transformations in
national political life.
Jennifer Jurgens
jjurge2@emory.edu
Education
BA in History, with a minor in Social Thought, UCLA, 2016
Research Interests
American religious history
American political history
Intellectual history
Political and state violence
Rhetoric
EMORY PHD HISTORY
Dissertation Title
TBD
Faculty Advisors
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Jonathan Prude
Dawn Peterson
Biography
I am interested generally in the intellectual histories of American political and religious
movements and traditions, with specific interests in how these traditions interact on behalf of
the state with regards to American warmaking and control/use of individual bodies. I explore
how the politics of loss and the rhetoric of the American jeremiad operated alternately in
conjunction with and in opposition to ideas of American providential blessing or
exceptionalism in American war efforts from the mid-19th century on. My interest in how
political and religious rhetorics influence and interact has led to a general interest in American
Protestant print culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I also look at the broader role of
providential, apocalyptic, and revelatory thought in the American political tradition.
Additionally, I am intrigued by the response that religious communities had to emergent war
and communications technologies and their usage in warmaking and the mediation of war
generated trauma and grief.
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EMORY PHD HISTORY
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EMORY PHD HISTORY
Emory has a thriving, nationally recognized doctoral program in U.S. history with 13 faculty
members and 8 associated faculty. US History students form close mentoring relationships
with faculty amid a lively intellectual community of graduate students from many different
fields within the history department, as well as within the larger interdisciplinary community
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in the Laney Graduate School.
Students admitted to the U.S. history program receive rigorous and comprehensive training
in U.S. history from the colonial period through the twentieth century as well as in their chosen
fields of specialization. The program has strengths in U.S. slavery and emancipation; race,
ethnicity, and immigration; African American history; gender and sexuality; Civil Rights history;
U.S. Religious History; and Modern Conservatism. Comparable strengths in Latin American and
African History support the investigation of comparative, diasporic, and transnational histories
as well. Students have excellent opportunities for training in the digital humanities through
the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and for cross-disciplinary study through the
department’s close ties with the programs in Women’s Studies, African-American
Studies, Jewish Studies, the Department of Religion, and the Graduate Institute of the Liberal
Arts. Additionally, students receive pedagogical training through the nationally recognized
TATTO program, which prepares students across the university for the challenges of teaching
in higher education institutions.
For more information on research specialties in U.S. History, see the individual faculty
webpages.
Graduation
PhD Recipient Dissertation Title
Year
2016 Erica Ann "'Slave Traffick': The Informal Economy, the Law, and the
Bruchko Social Order of South Carolina Cotton Country, 1793-
1860"
EMORY PHD HISTORY
2016 Colin Edward "The Not-So-Far Right: Radical Right-Wing Politics in the
Reynolds United States, 1941-1977"
2015 Edward Adair "The Too-Busy City: Atlanta and Urbanity at the End of
Hatfield the Twentieh Century"
2015 Andrea Scionti "Not Our Kind of Anti-Communists: Americans and the
Congress for Cultural Freedom in France and Italy, 1950-
1969"
2014 Sean Thomas "The United States in Opposition: The United Nations,
Byrnes The Third World, and Changing American Visions of
Global Order, 1970-1984"
2014 Christopher "From the Lower Sort to the Lower Orders: Labor and
Paul Sawula Self-Identity in Boston, 1737-1837"
2014 Samir Indar "For Whom the Blame Tolls: Richard Nixon, Henry
Singh Kissinger, and te Plight of Cambodi"
2014 D. Nathan "Elusive Equality: The Nuclear Arms Race in Europe and
Vigil the History of the INF Treaty, 1969-1988"
2011 Katherine "Thy Will Lord, Not Mine: Parents, Grief, and Child Death
Armstrong in the Antebellum South"
2010 Worth Hayes "In Our Own Hands: Black Private Education in Chicago,
1940-1986"
2010 Lisa Vox "The Death Wish of Humanity: Religious and Scientific
Apocalypticism in the United States, 1859-2001"
2009 Michael "Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Life along
Thompson Charleston's Waterfront, 1783-1861"
2006 Paul O'Grady "Vital Arteries: A History of the Streets of New York, 1783-
1863"
2005 Carey "Always a Minority: Richmond Area Free Blacks in the Civil
Latimore War Era"
2004 Brian Luskey "The Marginal Men: Merchants' Clerks and Society in the
Northeastern United States, 1790-1860"
EMORY PHD HISTORY
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