Two Emory College of Arts and Sciences professors have won highly competitive National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowships that provide critical research funding. Both awardees are focused on deepening our knowledge of history, laws and communities across the state and the nation.
Christina E. Crawford, associate professor of modern and contemporary architecture and Masse-Martin NEH Professor of Art History, received $60,000. The funds will go toward a book on America’s first two public housing projects fully funded and directly built by the federal government: a pair of racially segregated developments in Atlanta.
Sameena Mulla, an associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, received $30,000 to help draft a book on racial rhetoric in court sentencing hearings in sexually violent crimes. It is her third book examining how the legal system treats sexual assault crimes, victims and defendants.
“We are immensely proud of Christina Crawford and Sameena Mulla for earning these prestigious fellowships, which recognize their scholarship’s profound impact on our understanding of history, law and society,” says Emory College Dean Barbara Krauthamer. “Their work deepens academic inquiry and fosters meaningful community dialogue and engagement.”
The fellowships for Crawford and Mulla are part of the NEH’s $22.6 million in awards announced in January, supporting 219 projects nationwide. Mulla, who is on leave this spring and has already begun writing her book, aims to have a draft ready by August. Crawford, who has completed the first three chapters of her book, will take up writing again in August, when she begins an academic-year sabbatical.
‘Model Housing’
Having written her dissertation on early Soviet architecture and planning, Crawford was working on a book about Soviet worker housing when she arrived at Emory in 2016.
Prior to moving to Atlanta, Crawford didn’t realize the city was on the leading edge of housing experimentation with Techwood Homes (for white families) and University Homes (for Black families), completed in 1936 and 1937, respectively.
She has since thrown herself into researching, with the help of Emory students, how the federally funded projects became high-quality examples of government investment. Her book aims to surface, and learn anew, how those models did and did not work.
“I think these were examples of genuinely good planning and architecture, and there are aspects of how the architects and clients thought about the problem of housing that are worth digging up,” Crawford says.
Both Techwood and University Homes aimed to show how government support could provide lower-middle-class Americans a chance to save money, qualify for federal mortgages and eventually become homeowners.
Those upwardly mobile dreams worked for Techwood residents. University Homes residents, though, lacked mortgage and neighborhood options in a segregated South.
Crawford also faced obstacles in finding records on University Homes as detailed as those for Techwood. One resource was Charles Forrest Palmer’s papers, which were gifted to Emory in 1969. Palmer was influential in shaping Atlanta public housing and then spring-boarding to shape housing policy nationally; his papers describe his work to secure “slum clearance” and the new construction in the Techwood Flats neighborhood.
“It became an ethical imperative for me, in my research, to foreground University Homes after so many years of its being dismissed as a secondary project. I believe that its design and construction was even more innovative for the time,” Crawford says.
For instance, renowned sociologist W.E.B. DuBois canvassed the community with his Atlanta University graduate students, to gather resident input before construction began on University Homes. This resulted in specific design features, such as private ground-floor entryways for second-floor units that mimicked the feel of single-family homes.
Archival trips to Washington, D.C., and New York City funded by the College’s Program to Enhance Research and Scholarship (PERS) helped Crawford learn more about the community-building aspect of both complexes.
Each housing project included space for shops, medical offices and playgrounds, for instance. Fewer cross-through streets encouraged walking and safety for neighborhood children, while ornamental flourishes such as awnings and brass mail slots conveyed a sense of architectural quality.
Cost cutting eliminated those niceties in new public housing built after 1937, when municipal housing authorities took control of the process. Atlanta demolished all public housing complexes between the 1990s and early 2000s, decades before Crawford began to view their original architecture and design as history worth understanding.
“We are sitting in an absolutely devastating housing crisis, and I am making a soft pitch that the federal government has a role to play,” Crawford says. “It is not socialism; it’s the federal government deciding that housing matters. This project is a chance to look at how it was accomplished in the past and learn how to create architecture that serves multiple generations of Americans.”
Examining sentencing factors for violent crime
An anthropologist by training, Mulla is particularly interested in engaged research that can help make sense of cultural issues, especially in how gender, race and power intersect.
Mulla drew on years of participatory research in a Maryland emergency room for her first book, “The Violence of Care,” which analyzed how nurses collect and preserve evidence while also addressing the medical needs of patients who have been sexually assaulted.
Her second book, “Bodies of Evidence,” was a collaboration with Marquette University sociologist Heather Hlavka, which followed that evidence into the courts.
Mulla’s NEH project builds on her earlier research, scrutinizing 130 sentencing hearings for sexual assault crimes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The book will describe the reasoning and language used to craft sentences following plea deals or trials in which defendants were found guilty of violent sexual crimes.
“Sentencing hearings are presented as very structured and very technical, with the same tools like algorithms for recidivism and sentencing guidelines used almost every time,” Mulla says. “In practice, though, they have so many variables that they can become antithetical to the values of our justice system.”
For instance, Mulla found that common tools for calculating sentencing recommendations use proprietary algorithms, meaning not all factors are public or transparent. Race is among the known considerations but employs indirect factors that serve as racial proxies, such as home ownership.
Mulla says the net effect is a “race-blind” system that specifically tends to over-predict recidivism rates for African American men and under-predict for similarly convicted white defendants.
In addition, those findings are not designed to work alongside other instruments used in sentencing. Ultimately, prosecutors and judges decide how much weight to give certain factors, or even whether to consider them.
“We talk about criminal sentencing in a way that it is rational and reasonable, when the research shows it is the use of science in a very unscientific way,” Mulla says. “It’s not science. It’s feelings.”
Lost in that process are survivors, who are often drained and unsettled by the entire process. Hearings that ignore the reality that many victims come from the same community — even the same household — as defendants can further wound victims with harsh assumptions.
“I am deeply invested in violence-free futures for vulnerable people, and this is not getting us there,” Mulla says.
Once she completes the book draft this year, Mulla is interested in building further on her research. She has taken preliminary steps to conduct participatory research on hearings held by civilian oversight boards for police departments in California, Michigan and Wisconsin. She would like to add a Georgia commission to that review, in part to train undergraduate students on conducting ethnographic research.
“It’s one thing to say this is the data,” Mulla says. “I am interested in quantifying what is happening in a way you can’t measure with numbers.”