The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) is pleased to announce the 2024 Maria Stewart Prize for the best journal article in Black intellectual history. Named after abolitionist and women’s rights activist-intellectual Maria Stewart, the prize will recognize the best journal article concerning Black intellectual history (broadly conceived) published between January 2023 and December 2023 by a member of AAIHS. The winner will receive $500, an award certificate, and a featured spot on Black Perspectives. The prize is open to scholars at all stages of their academic careers. The award winner will be announced formally at the 2024 AAIHS Conference in March.
All application materials should be received by December 1, 2023. Please send a PDF of the article and a nomination letter* (briefly summarizing the article’s main argument and contributions to the field) to awards@aaihs.org.
*Self-nominations are welcome and encouraged.
2023-2024 Prize Committee
- Chair: Dr. Russell Rickford, Cornell University
- Dr. Jillean McCommons, University of Richmond
- Dr. Sean Gallagher, Colorado Mesa University
*Please do not email submissions to the committee–send all submissions and inquires directly to awards@aaihs.org.
Previous Recipients
- Brandon R. Byrd, “Ebenezer Bassett and Frederick Douglass: An Intellectual History of Black U. S. Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 46, no. 1 (January 2022): 35-69.
- Crystal Webster, “Transfiguring the Soul of Childhood”: Du Bois’s Private Vision and Public Activism for Black Children,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 14, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 347-366.
- Isadora Moura Mota, “Other Geographies of Struggle: Afro-Brazilians and the American Civil War,” Hispanic American Historical Review 100: 1 (2020): 35-62.
- Laura Helton, “On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading,” PMLA 134.1 (2019): 99-120.
- Daniel Fleming, “‘I Have a Copyright’: The Privatization of Martin Luther King’s Dream,” Journal of African American History, 103, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 369-401.
- Sasha Turner, “The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition, 38: 1 (2017): 232-250.
- David P. Stein, “‘This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy’: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s,” Souls 18, no. 1 (March 2016): 80–105.