Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize

The AAIHS Conference Planning Committee invites submissions for the 2024 Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize named after W.E.B Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. This annual prize recognizes the most outstanding paper presented by a graduate student at the annual AAIHS conference. The committee will judge the written paper on which the presentation is based (normally 10-12 pages in length; double-spaced; size 12 font; one inch margins). Graduate students must first be accepted to present at the conference in order to be eligible for this award. In addition to a monetary prize of $150, the winner will receive a plaque and their conference registration fee will be waived. All academic fields of history will be considered, and essays must be submitted with full citations (Chicago style footnotes preferred).

The deadline for the 2024 Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize is February 16, 2024.

To apply for the prize, submit a cover letter listing your name, email, institutional affiliation, and phone number along with the name of your graduate adviser below. Please also indicate your graduate student year and verify that your paper was accepted by the conference planning committee. In addition to the cover letter, send a copy of the paper in Microsoft Word. Please do not send submissions to the committee members.

*Please send all submissions and questions about the 2024 Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize via the link below:

Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize application

 


Previous Recipients

2023–Cinnamon WilliamsNorthwestern University

  • “Home Is Where The Work Is: A Reading of Skills Articles in Third World Women’s Alliance’s Triple Jeopardy Newspaper.”

2022–Andrew LesterRutgers University-Newark

  • “‘We Must Document Ourselves Now’: 1970s Black Lesbian Writing and Publishing as Everyday Memory-Making Practices.”

2021–Margarita RosaPrinceton University

  • “The Notorious Negress: Belle Williams, Black Geographies, and Carcerality in 1890s Los Angeles”

2020–Leo Valdes, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

  • “Breaking Cages: Preliminary Thoughts on Race, Transgender Identity, and Black Prison Organizing.”

2019–Clayton Vaughn-Roberson, Carnegie Mellon University 

  • “Premature Anti-Fascists: The National Negro Congress and the Spanish Civil War”

2018–Natalie ShibleyUniversity of Pennsylvania

  • “‘Not fit material for anyone to print’: Race, Respectability, and Military Homosexuality Investigations, 1945-1950”

2017–Andrew Pope, Harvard University

  • “Less Spelling, More Mathematics: Model Neighborhood, Inc. and the Remaking of Black Power in Atlanta, 1966-1974”

2016Jonathan Lande, Brown University

  • “The Black Badge of Courage: The Politics of Freedom and the Memory of Black Soldiers in the Civil War”
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Keisha N. Blain

Keisha N. Blain

Keisha N. Blain, a Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellow, is Professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University. She is the author of several books—most recently of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press, 2021) and Wake Up America: Black Women on the Future of Democracy (W.W. Norton, 2024). Follow her on Twitter @KeishaBlain.