Wesley-Logan Prize
The Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history is jointly sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life & History. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding book in African diaspora history. The AHA Committee on Minority Historians established the prize in 1992 in memory of two early pioneers in the field, Charles H. Wesley and Rayford W. Logan.
The prize is offered for a book on some aspect of the history of the dispersion, settlement and adjustment, and/or return of peoples originally from Africa. Eligible for consideration are books in any chronological period and any geographical location. The current prize amount is $1,000. See the list of past recipients.
The general rules for submission are:
- Only books of high scholarly and literary merit will be considered.
- Books with a copyright of 2023 are eligible for the 2024 award.
- Nomination submissions may be made by an author or by a publisher. Publishers may submit as many entries as they wish. Authors or publishers may submit the same book for multiple AHA prizes.
- Nominators must complete an online prize submission form for each book submitted.
- One copy of each entry must be sent to each committee member and clearly labeled “Wesley-Logan Prize Entry.” Print copies preferred unless otherwise indicated. If only e-copy is available, please contact review committee members beforehand to arrange submission format.
Please Note: Entries must be received by May 15, 2024, to be eligible for the 2024 competition. Entries will not be returned. Recipients will be announced on the AHA website in October 2024 and recognized during a ceremony at the January 2025 AHA annual meeting in New York.
For questions, please contact the Prize Administrator.
2023 Wesley-Logan Prize
Shannen Dee Williams, University of Dayton
Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke Univ. Press)
By centering the lives of Black Catholic nuns, Subversive Habits offers a groundbreaking perspective on freedom struggles in North America across the eras of Jim Crow, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter. Shannen Dee Williams’s exhaustive research reveals Black religious women working as educators, civil rights organizers, and liberation theologians to confront sexist, white supremacist structures within Catholicism and US society. In Williams’s skillful hands, Black nuns’ freedom dreams become an important site for excavating new dimensions of African diasporic history.