The American Historical Association is pleased to announce the winners of its 2023 prizes, to be awarded at the AHA’s 137th annual meeting, which will take place in San Francisco from January 4–7, 2024.
The AHA offers annual prizes honoring exceptional books, distinguished teaching and mentoring in the classroom, public history, and other historical projects. Since 1896, the Association has conferred over 1,000 awards. This year’s finalists were selected from a field of over 1,300 entries by nearly 150 dedicated prize committee members. The names, publications, and projects of those who received these awards are a catalog of the best work produced in the historical discipline.
Awards for Publications
The Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for an author’s first book in European history from ancient times through 1815
Clara E. Mattei (New School for Social Research) for The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2022)
The AHA Prize in American History for an author’s first or second book in US history
Kathryn Olivarius (Stanford Univ.) for Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2022)
The George Louis Beer Prize in European international history since 1895
Emily Marker (Rutgers Univ.–Camden) for Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell Univ. Press, 2022)
The Jerry Bentley Prize in world history
James Poskett (Univ. of Warwick) for Horizons: A Global History of Science (Viking, 2022)
The Albert J. Beveridge Award in the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada, from 1492 to the present
Kirsten Silva Gruesz (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) for Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Study of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2022)
The James Henry Breasted Prize in any field of history prior to CE 1000
Xin Wen (Princeton Univ.) for The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton Univ. Press, 2022)
The Raymond J. Cunningham Prize for the best article published in a journal written by an undergraduate student
Jacqueline Wu (Yale Univ.) for “The Chinese Labor Experiment: Contract Workers in the Northeastern United States, 1870–1880,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 90, no. 2 (Spring 2023)
Faculty adviser: Joe William Trotter (Carnegie Mellon Univ.)
The Patricia Buckley Ebrey Prize in East Asian history prior to 1800
Wei Yu Wayne Tan (Hope Coll.) for Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2022)
The John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian history since 1800
H. Yumi Kim (Johns Hopkins Univ.) for Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford Univ. Press, 2022)
The Morris D. Forkosch Prize in British, British imperial, or British Commonwealth history since 1485
Steven King (Nottingham Trent Univ.), Paul Carter (National Archives, UK), Natalie Carter (Nottingham Trent Univ.), Peter Jones (Univ. of Glasgow), and Carol Beardmore (Open Univ.) for In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900 (McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2022)
The Leo Gershoy Award in 17th- and 18th-century western European history
Meredith Martin (New York Univ.) and Gillian Weiss (Case Western Reserve Univ.) for The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France (Getty Research Inst., 2022)
The William and Edwyna Gilbert Award for the best article in a journal, magazine, or other serial on teaching history
Michael P. Marino (Coll. of New Jersey) for “Rethinking Historical Thinking: How Historians Use Unreliable Evidence,” The History Teacher 55, no. 2 (February 2022)
The J. Franklin Jameson Award for outstanding achievement in the editing of historical primary sources
Kevin Terraciano (Univ. of California, Los Angeles) for Codex Sierra: A Nahuatl-Mixtec Book of Accounts from Colonial Mexico (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2021)
The Friedrich Katz Prize in Latin American and Caribbean history
Brian P. Owensby (Univ. of Virginia) for New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy (Stanford Univ. Press, 2022)
The Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in women’s history and/or feminist theory
Kerri K. Greenidge (Tufts Univ.) for The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (W.W. Norton, 2022)
The Martin A. Klein Prize in African history
Paul S. Landau (Univ. of Maryland at Coll. Park and Univ. of Johannesburg) for Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio Univ. Press, 2022)
The Littleton-Griswold Prize in US law and society, broadly defined
William J. Novak (Univ. of Michigan) for New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State (Harvard Univ. Press, 2022)
The J. Russell Major Prize in French history
Sara E. Black (Christopher Newport Univ.) for Drugging France: Mind-Altering Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century (McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2022)
The Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian history or Italian-American relations
Diana Garvin (Univ. of Oregon) for Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2022)
The George L. Mosse Prize in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since 1500
Pamela H. Smith (Columbia Univ.) for From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2022)
The Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the history of journalism
Janet Afary (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) and Kamran Afary (California State Univ., Los Angeles) for Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906–1911 (Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2022)
The James A. Rawley Prize in the integration of Atlantic worlds before the 20th century
Adriana Chira (Emory Univ.) for Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022)
The John F. Richards Prize in South Asian history
Shailaja Paik (Univ. of Cincinnati) forThe Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford Univ. Press, 2022)
The Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in the history of the Jewish diaspora
Emily Michelson (Univ. of St. Andrews) for Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance (Princeton Univ. Press, 2022)
The Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History to a freely available new media project
Katherine McDonough (Lancaster Univ. and Alan Turing Inst.), Daniel CS Wilson (Alan Turing Inst.), Kaspar Beelen (Univ. of London), Kasra Hosseini (Zalando Research), Rosie Wood (Alan Turing Inst.), Andrew Smith (Alan Turing Inst.), Kalle Westerling (Alan Turing Inst.), Daniel van Strien (Hugging Face), Olivia Vane (The Economist), Jon Lawrence (Exeter Univ.), and Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary Univ. of London and Alan Turing Inst.) for MapReader (Living with Machines, 2022)
The Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history
Shannen Dee Williams (Univ. of Dayton) for Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke Univ. Press, 2022)
Awards for Scholarly and Professional Distinction
The Troyer Steele Anderson Prize for contributions to the advancement of the purposes of the Association
Michael Les Benedict (Ohio State Univ.)
The Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award for outstanding postsecondary history teaching
Stephen Jackson (Univ. of Kansas)
The Beveridge Family Teaching Prize for distinguished K–12 history teaching
Christopher W. Stanley (Ponaganset High School)
Equity Awards for individuals and institutions that have achieved excellence in recruiting and retaining underrepresented racial and ethnic groups into the historical discipline
Donald Fixico (Arizona State Univ.)
The Herbert Feis Award for distinguished contributions to public history
Adam Clulow (Univ. of Texas at Austin)
The John Lewis Award for History and Social Justice to recognize a historian for leadership and sustained engagement at the intersection of historical work and social justice
Joe William Trotter (Carnegie Mellon Univ.)
The John Lewis Award for Public Service to the Discipline of History to recognize individuals outside the ranks of professional historians who have made a significant contribution to the study, teaching, and public understanding of history, in the interest of social justice
Julieanna Richardson (The HistoryMakers)
The Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award for teachers of history who taught, guided, and inspired their students in a way that changed their lives
Brittany Fremion (Central Michigan Univ.)
The Tikkun Olam Prize for Promoting Public Historical Literacy to honor individuals whose work has promoted literacy in public culture
Marvin Dunn (Florida International Univ.)
The Honorary Foreign Member for a foreign scholar who is distinguished in their field and who has “notably aided the work of American historians”
Gábor Klaniczay (Central European Univ.)
The Award for Scholarly Distinction to senior historians for lifetime achievement
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Harvard Univ.)
Michael A. Gomez (New York Univ.)
Geoffrey Parker (Ohio State Univ.)
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