URC – Halle Global Research

Laura Emmery, PhD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, MUSIC

Cold War Cultural Diplomacy: Music Festivals in Yugoslavia

Taking advantage of the Cold War political divisions and the country's distinctive non-aligned position, Yugoslav artists created cultural exchange programs that bridged the East-West divide. Music festivals, in particular, served a special role in enabling the exchange of ideas from both ideological worlds, making the Iron Curtain less impermeable. This project examines the emergence of postwar Yugoslav cultural programs that made the new communist state one of the most significant centers for experimental musicians and artists from both Blocs through the sudden and violent dissolution of that program in 1991, with the collapse of the political state.

Mehtap Ozdemir, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The Relevant Subject: Ottoman Cosmopolitics and The Ends of World Literature

In recent decades, world literature has significantly expanded. After its resurgence at the turn of the century, when it reawakened the cosmopolitan horizon of comparative studies, world literary space has become no longer commensurate with (post)colonial European geographies. It now includes other literary cosmopolises across a Eurasian span and no longer privileges the modern era alone. These efforts have enriched world literature by foregrounding diverse genealogies across geographical and temporal registers. Yet if world literature is understood more as a modern knowledge system than an international system of circulation, the metric of inclusion, adding previously excluded languages, locales, and histories, remains insufficient to address its colonial architecture, which valorizes certain modes of knowing and being as relevant while rendering others irrelevant. Taking Ottoman/Turkish literary modernity (1860s-1940s) as a critical site to interrogate world literature as a technology of subject formation, this book argues that the subject of world literature operates within a double economy of relevance in the modern era. On the one hand, the book identifies an economic logic of translation that sustains modern world literature by producing relevant measures for universal comparability alongside residual forms that exceed comparison. On the other hand, it conceptualizes modern subjectivity as an inherently tensile formation, structured by this logic of relevance yet disclosed through linguistic, aesthetic, and fictional residues. By foregrounding translation as a constitutive condition of modern subjectivity, the book shows how modern forms of knowing and being come into existence, while also suggesting that the ethical task of the world literary subject lies in living responsibly in the interval between relevance and irrelevance.

Leonardo Velloso-Lyons, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE

Figural Africa: Race, Historiography and the Global Turn in Early Modernity (1550-1630)

The imperial ventures of Iberians in the early modern period did much to shape the world as we know it today. From establishing the transatlantic slave trade to the colonization of vast swathes of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the impacts of that time carry through to our present in countless untold ways, not least of which is how we think about Africa and its place in the world. Examining histories written in Peru, Ecuador, Senegambia, and Iberia, my project shows how a group of historians theorized Africa for their readers, in doing so, constructing racialized geographic identities that could rationalize colonial projects around the globe. My findings show that these historians did this in ways that not only contributed to but also transcended the now common colonialist image of the African continent as a provider of human labor and raw materials. While diverse orders of knowledge (cartographic, ethnographic, antiquarian, etc.) shape these historians’ works, as well as their local realities in each place, my project reveals the common thread that underpins these histories: an unmistakably ambivalent rhetorical framework—one that acknowledges the centrality of Africans in the increasingly globalized Ibero-Atlantic world while also striving to limit their actual and symbolic influence by assigning them a racialized geographic identity. Africa and African peoples, as I argue, were an important hinge for early modern historians who sought to reduce the continent to a series of transposable figures of thought that could be used to understand and evaluate non-African peoples and places.

Kali Gross, PhD

PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

First to Burn: Black Women and the Long History of American Execution

Beginning with the 1681 trial of Mariah, an enslaved Black woman burned at the stake in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for arson, _First to Burn: Black Women and the Long History of American Execution_ will chart how capital punishment evolved and disproportionately impacted Black women in America. Mariah was not simply the first Black woman burned at the stake; she was the first woman to be burned in what would become the continental United States. In fact, Black women account for several “historic firsts” in the administration of capital punishment from the 1600s to the present, and they unwillingly played a central role in the evolution of death penalty practices. With the support of a URC, First to Burn will be the first book to focus on this overlooked history.

Karida Brown, PhD

PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, SOCIOLOGY

A New Grammar of Modernity: Racial Capitalism and the Making of the Modern World

Sociology continues to rely on a view of modernity bounded by the geography of Europe and the temporal wall of 1492. This framing situates modernity as an effect of European awakening, rather than an extension of enmeshed preexisting imperial and proto-capitalist systems spanning Africa, Arabia, Asia, and Europe--systems that were later exported and scaled to the hemispheric Americas. In doing so, we reproduce the epistemic hierarchies between “the West and the Rest.” My research asks: What new understandings of modernity emerge when we trace its origins not to Europe, but to the medieval world system that bound four continents—an interconnected political economy birthed through empire, religion, commerce, and slavery?  This grant will support archival and site-based research that traces the transition from the late medieval to the early modern world through the Iberian Atlantic. Specifically, I will use URC funds to conduct research travel across Portugal, Spain, the Atlantic Islands, and Brazil—sites that formed the connective tissue of the early Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the emergence of global racial capitalism. These locations house critical archives, burial grounds, port cities, and material remains that document Europe’s early experiments with slavery, finance, and imperial governance prior to and alongside expansion into the Americas.

Nathan Hoffmann, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, SOCIOLOGY

Sexual Minority Migrants in the European Union

The policy landscape for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) people in the European Union (EU) has shifted rapidly, with increasing rights in many states while others retrench with anti-queer legislation. Effects of these shifting policies have been studied in such realms as employment and health, but little is known about how new laws have affected the migration decisions of LGBQ people. With freedom of movement open to many Europeans and a variety of policy contexts, the EU constitutes an ideal test case to assess how changing laws and culture in origins and destinations interact with individual identity to crystallize into migration decisions. The proposed URC project investigates the effects of LGBQ policy changes on the migration of queer people in two ways. First, a quantitative analysis of European Union Labor Force Survey data for 1983 to 2023 will characterize the population of migrants in same-sex couples in the EU and assess how changing laws have related to changing incidence of these LGBQ couples. Second, to shed light on the actual motivations of queer people who choose to migrate, I will conduct 20 interviews with queer migrants in Belgium, where leading migration and sexualities scholars have invited to host me at two universities. The URC grant will support this research by granting me time to conduct the quantitative analysis, funding two trips to Brussels, and enabling the publication of at least two papers on my journey to tenure and future external funding.

Abraham Oshotse, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, GOIZUETA BUSINESS SCHOOL, ORGANIZATION & MANAGEMENT

Understanding Reading Engagement and Retention on Digital Literacy Platforms: Evidence from 22 Million Families

Six in ten children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read a simple story after years of schooling. Literacy deficits constrain human capital formation, with downstream consequences for economic development. While home literacy environments are critical to reading outcomes, existing research emphasizes school factors while neglecting homes and communities. Digital platforms offer a transformative opportunity: where physical books are scarce, mobile phones are plentiful. This project investigates reading engagement determinants through a partnership with Worldreader, whose BookSmart platform reaches 22+ million families globally. Using 45+ million event records, we ask: What book characteristics predict sustained reading? How does content typicality affect engagement? What factors predict churn? Employing two-part engagement models and hazard specifications, we estimate effects across initiation, intensity, breadth, and disengagement. This research contributes to organizational sociology and education research while providing evidence-based guidance for content strategies that support literacy development.

Bin Xu, PhD

PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, SOCIOLOGY

When Millions of Bells Toll: How the World Remembers and Forgets COVID Deaths

How do societies around the world commemorate and memorialize the mass, excess, and unequal COVID deaths? What do the commemoration and memorialization tell us about the world the COVID dead left behind? If commemoration and memorialization are intended to remember, reflect, and heal, what forms do they take to achieve the goals? These questions are significant for the public understanding of this unprecedented crisis and for various disciplines and interdisciplinary areas, including sociology, memory studies, and public health. I examine cases of public mourning for important individuals, commemorative rituals, memorial sites, artistic works with memorialization purposes, and so on. I treat commemoration and memorialization as complex social and political processes, including advocacy, sponsorship, organizing, public debates, activism, protests, etc. I have collected textual and visual data of 290 cases of commemoration and memorialization from 11 countries with the most casualties and have conducted fieldwork in Italy. I am applying for this grant to support research in the next stage of the project, including a survey with involved people, a quantitative content analysis of the textual and visual data, and two fieldwork trips to the UK and Brazil, including site visits to memorials and interviews with groups and individuals involved in the memorialization process. The specific goal of this project is to publish a public-facing book and two peer-reviewed articles (one of which was published). The ultimate goal is to use my research and writing to record history, diagnose problems, and resist forgetting.

"Tony" Zirui Yang, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, POLITICAL SCIENCE

Swiping Democracy Away? How TikTok Shapes Democratic Values and Public Opinion toward China

TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has become one of the world's most popular social media platforms, particularly among younger users. Meanwhile, recent surveys show that TikTok users in democratic societies have more favorable views toward China and less faith in liberal democratic systems. Therefore, democratic governments increasingly worry that TikTok may influence public opinion, with the US, EU, and India restricting or investigating the platform. Yet, few research investigates whether such suspicion is supported by evidence, and if so, through what specific mechanisms. This project examines whether and how TikTok use shapes attitudes toward China and democratic values in Taiwan, a democracy facing sustained geopolitical and informational pressure from China. We propose a field experiment using a withdrawal design, where 2,000 active TikTok users are randomly assigned to either deactivate their accounts or continue normal usage for one month. By measuring changes in democratic values and attitudes toward China before and after the intervention, and tracking ex ante TikTok content exposure, this study provides rigorous causal evidence on TikTok's political effects and identify whether political or non-political content is the root cause. Our findings will inform ongoing policy debates about foreign platforms, national security, and democratic resilience, and will generate preliminary data for larger grant proposals on the impact of Chinese Artificial Intelligence on democracies to the National Science Foundation. Results will also help democratic governments develop evidence-based approaches to addressing potential foreign influence through social media while preserving freedom of speech of their own citizens.