Award for Scholarly Distinction
In 1984 the AHA Council established the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction to honor senior historians in the United States. Previous awards have gone to 77 eminent scholars.
According to the selection criteria, recipients must be senior historians of the highest distinction who have spent the bulk of their professional careers in the United States. Generally, they must also be of emeritus rank, if from academic life, or equivalent standing otherwise. Under normal circumstances the award is not intended to go to former presidents of the Association; rather, the intent is to honor persons not otherwise recognized by the profession to an extent commensurate with their contributions.
The Committee on Honorary Foreign Members and Awards for Scholarly Distinction will serve as the jury and will recommend up to three individuals for approval at the Council's spring meeting. The committee consists of the president, president-elect, and the immediate past president. The honoree(s) will be announced at the Association’s annual meeting.
2022 Awards for Scholarly Distinction
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was professor emerita at Rutgers University. Hall was a pioneering scholar of the African diaspora and the slave trade and the author of six books and dozens of scholarly articles. For 40 years, she established herself as the preeminent expert on the history of African slavery in Louisiana. In addition, she was an innovator in digital humanities, building the first online database of enslaved people, a database that became the inspiration for similar projects, including the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
Joe W. Trotter, Carnegie Mellon University
Joe William Trotter, Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice at Carnegie Mellon University, is a distinguished, prolific scholar of African American history, with a specialty in urban labor. Beginning with his first monograph, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (1985), his work has challenged that of scholars who interpret Black urban history through the narrow lens of the ghetto. Instead, he focuses on labor relations between Blacks and whites, on the working-class dimension of the Black urban experience, and on the larger political economy in which Black workers were embedded. His work has been instrumental in shaping historians’ views of Black urban life in all its complexity. Trotter’s many publications are notable for their cutting-edge scholarship and for their wide variety, bringing the results of his extensive archival research to audiences inside and outside the academy.
Judith E. Tucker, Georgetown University
Before Judith Tucker’s work, there hardly was a field of women’s and gender history of the Middle East and North Africa. She has been the brilliant guide to the field through a cluster of six influential books that have traced how both lay Muslims and jurists negotiated their way through Islamic legal doctrines and how women used sharia courts to give themselves a voice. She has trained some of the most influential PhDs in her field and served as the president of the Middle East Studies Association from 2017 to 2019.