Announcing the 2024 AAIHS Award Winners
We are pleased to announce the 2024 AAIHS award winners–winners 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 will be honored at the 2024 AAIHS conference, hosted by The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Please join us in celebrating these excellent scholars!
Pauli Murray Book Prize
Prize Winning Book: Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (New York: NYU Press, 2023)
J.T. Roane is assistant professor of Africana Studies and Geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. Roane’s short experimental film Plot received support from Princeton’s Crossroads Fellowship. He also currently serves as a member of Just Harvest—Tidewater, an Indigenous and Black led organization building toward food sovereignty and justice in Virginia’s historical plantation region through political and practical education. Roane is a 2023-2024 Visiting Scholar in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard.
Maria Stewart Journal Article Prize
Prize Winning Article: “More Upset Than Most: Measuring and Understanding African American Responses to the Kennedy Assassination,” American Quarterly 75, no. 2 (June 2023): 279-307.
Sharron Wilkins Conrad is a historian of the Civil Rights Movement and how it intersects with the American presidency. She is an Associate Professor of History at Tarrant County College, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Her book manuscript examines how perceptions of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights leadership developed, hardened and continues to circulate within the Black community. Her scholarship focuses on the process by which Kennedy emerged as a civil rights hero for African Americans while Johnson—who fought for and signed into law historic civil rights legislation—has been viewed as being motivated solely by political self-interest. Conrad received her PhD in Humanities from The University of Texas at Dallas in 2019. She holds a BA in History and Anthropology from Penn State University, and a MA in Public History from Howard University. Previously, she served as Director of Education and Public Programs at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, interpreting the life and legacy of President Kennedy. Her professional career has included appointments at history museums around the country.
C.L.R. James Research Fellowships
Ashley Everson is a PhD candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Ashley earned her B.A. with honors distinction in Social Thought and Political Economy and her M.A. in Political Science with a graduate certificate in African Diaspora Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include Black feminist thought, political theory, labor history, and Black women’s political histories. Her dissertation research seeks to investigate the relationship between Black political mobilization in the Tennessee Valley region and decolonial organizing throughout the African Diaspora during the interwar period.
Norma Watson is a PhD Candidate at The Penn State University in the departments of History and African American & Diaspora Studies. Currently Norma is a Center for Humanities and Information Fellow at Penn State and is co-organizer of the Black Experiences in the Wider Atlantic Initiative and Symposium. Norma’s proposed dissertation “Culture, Love, & Politics: Understanding AfroBrazilian Organizing 1930-1968” examines various AfroBrazilian political and cultural spaces in São Paulo and specifically investigates AfroBrazilian women’s contributions. With the financial support of the CLR James Research Fellowship, Norma will conduct research in São Paulo, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro. Using newspapers, published diaries, an oral history project, and court cases from Brazil’s military dictatorship period, she locates non-formal learning spaces utilized for Black consciousness raising with the objective to trace AfroBrazilian women and men’s contributions to Pan-African intellectual history.
Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize
Prize Winning Paper: “40 Acres and the Moon”
Adriana Green is a cross-genre writer from southern Virginia with a love of all things otherworldly. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in UC Berkeley’s African American & African Diaspora Studies Department where she engages in archival research, literary critique, and black feminist theory. Adriana’s dissertation is a meditation on the dispersal of black people not only across space but across time during the long years of and leading up to modernity. Most recently, she began a short-term research fellowship at the Huntington Library to explore Octavia E. Butler’s archive.