Announcing the AAIHS 2025 Award Winners
We are pleased to announce the 2025 AAIHS award winners—recipients of the Pauli Murray Book Prize, the Maria Stewart Journal Article Prize, the C.L.R. James Research Fellowships, and the Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize! Winners were recently honored at the 2025 AAIHS conference, co-sponsored by Brown University. Please join us in celebrating these excellent scholars!
Pauli Murray Book Prize
Prize Winning Book: A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (University of North Carolina Press, 2024)
Crystal R. Sanders is an award-winning historian of the United States in the twentieth century. Her latest book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs, explores the long history of racial inequality in higher education through the postbaccalaureate experiences of African Americans during the Jim Crow era. She introduces readers to “segregation scholarships,” a little-known scheme birthed in the South that undermined the letter and spirit of the legal doctrine of “separate but equal,” and created the funding inequity in our nation’s colleges and universities that is still prevalent today. She is also the author of A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. Sanders’s work can also be found in many of the leading history journals including the Journal of Southern History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of African American History. Sanders is an associate professor of African American Studies at Emory University where she teaches courses on civil rights history, Black women’s history, and the history of Black education.
Maria Stewart Journal Article Prize
Prize Winning Article: “Exposing the Racial Illogics of Jim Crow Segregation: Mary Church Terrell’s Situational Resistance,” Global Black Thought, Vol. One, Issue One, pp. 40-65.
Sabrina Evans is an Assistant Professor of English at Howard University, specializing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature with a focus on Black women’s writing, archives, and organizing. Her research examines the intellectual thought and literary production of Black clubwomen such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett as well as the networks and communities that helped sustain their intellectual and activist work. She is a JT Mellon Satellite Partner with the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University, serving as project co-coordinator for the Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA). BWOA is a digital humanities project that seeks to locate the scattered archives of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black women organizers and create teaching and research resources. In this work, she has collaborated with a team of faculty, graduate students, archivists, and librarians to produce papers locators featuring digitized and nondigitized collections of early Black women organizers as well as a digital map highlighting the various libraries and repositories holding their collections.
C.L.R. James Research Fellowship
Jordan Ealey is a multidisciplinary Black feminist scholar-artist from Atlanta, Georgia. They are an Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. Ealey’s research focuses on Black feminist theories and praxis, Black theatre and performance, popular music, Black girlhood studies, and reproductive justice. Their work is published or forthcoming in The Black Scholar, Girlhood Studies, Studies in Musical Theatre, Theatre History Studies, He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night, and Staging Difficult Pasts. Ealey recently received an honorable mention for the 2024 Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research. Ealey co-hosts and co-created Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast, which is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons. Currently, Ealey serves as the Book Review Editor for The Black Theatre Review. They earned a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Dante A. Whittaker Jr. is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at New York University studying race, religion, politics, and land ownership in the post-Emancipation United States South. His dissertation, “Divine Lands, Divine Rights: Emancipation, Spiritual Politics, and Building Canaan in the Alabama Black Belt, 1862 – 1885,” explores how formerly enslaved Black people shaped their political goals of landholding through their religious understanding of the biblical Exodus story. Seeking to build Black communities and institutions like schools, churches, and financial associations, Black people rallied for each other to realize their journeys out of bondage and into freedom. Their religiopolitical quest for land ownership illustrates the lengthy emancipatory process of establishing a place for themselves in a reconstructing United States South. During his doctoral career, he has been awarded the Charles G. Summersell Center for the Study of the South Research Fellowship and the NYU GSAS Summer Research Fellowship.
Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize
Prize Winning paper: “Migrating mariners: African American Emigration, Maritime Poetics, and the Afterlives of Slavery on Caribbean Shores.”
Matthew Alexander Randolph is a historian and geographer investigating Black identities and connections across the African diaspora in the nineteenth-century (Afro-)Atlantic World. He is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford University who has conducted archival work throughout the Americas and Europe. He is also a former graduate fellow and instructor for the Stanford Department of African & African American Studies. In 2023, Randolph lived in the Dominican Republic as a Fulbright research fellow. His interdisciplinary scholarship retraces the story of African Americans who dreamed of freedom beyond U.S. borders, sailing southward in 1824 and settling along Samaná Bay in the northeastern region of the island (then part of Haiti). The research promises to enrich and expand discourses about Black people’s ancestral and ongoing ecological relationships as stewards of land and waterways across the Americas. His work is informed by the theoretical foundations and emergent ideas in the fields of Afrofuturism, Black Geographies/Ecologies, and Caribbean Studies, as well as inquiry into the afterlives of slavery. Outside of academia, he is passionate about public history, community-building, and social justice in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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