The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University has announced the three finalists for this year’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Presented annually in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City, the prize recognizes the best book written in English and copyrighted in the preceding year that discusses topics surrounding slavery, resistance, or abolition.
Selected from 82 total submissions, this year’s finalists are Kerri Greenidge, Sarah E. Johnson, and Emily Owens.
Kerri Greenidge, Mellon Associate Professor in the department of studies in race, colonialism, and diaspora at Tufts University in Massachusetts, is the author of The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2022). The book is a counternarrative to the history of White abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke that focuses on four generations of their Black family members and discusses the legacy of slavery through the twentieth century.
At Tufts, Dr. Greenidge serve as co-director of the African American Trail Project and co-director of the Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies Project. She holds a second faculty appointment in the department of history. In addition to her most recent book, she is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019).
Dr. Greenidge received her Ph.D. in American studies from Boston University.
Sarah E. Johnson, professor of literature of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego, is the author of Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2023). The book is a collection of materials about Moreau de Saint-Méry, a French writer who frequently discussed issues of colonial history in the late eighteenth century. It examines his life through the lens of other sources and their interpretations.
With a primary appointment in the department of literature, Dr. Johnson is an affiliated faculty member with UC San Diego’s Black diaspora and African American studies program, the Center for Iberian & Latin American Studies, the department of ethnic studies, and the critical gender studies program. She also co-directs the university’s Black Studies Project. Alongside Encyclopédie Noire, she has authored several academic publications including The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (University of California Press, 2012).
Dr. Johnson holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University in California.
Emily Owens, associate professor of history at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is the author of Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Centered around the survival strategies and intellectual labor of Black women enslaved in antebellum New Orleans, the book unravels how the formulation of rape law produced, rather than prevented, sexual violence against Black women.
Throughout her career in academia, Dr. Owens has focused her research and teaching endeavors on United States slavery, legal history of race and sexual violence, and the intellectual history of American feminism. In addition to her teaching role, she serves as director of her department’s honors program.
Dr. Owens earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University.
The winner of the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize will be announced later this fall.
