The following is a list of recipients of the various awards, prizes, and honors that will be presented during the 133rd annual meeting of the American Historical Association on Thursday, January 3, 2019, in the State Ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, Illinois.

2018 Awards for Scholarly and Professional Distinction

Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award

Catherine Denial, Knox College

Catherine Denial embodies the spirit of this award. Her students praise her as an engaging, creative, and supportive instructor who has guided many of them to professional success in the academy. She is a prolific contributor to larger conversations about history and pedagogy, taking part in roundtables and workshops addressing both the purpose of a historical education and how to teach successfully in the classroom. Finally, Denial has been instrumental in curriculum revision and has had a significant pedagogical impact on organizations and students.

Beveridge Family Teaching Prize

California Department of Education and the California History–Social Science Project, University of California, Davis

The California History–Social Science Project and the California Department of Education together made a forceful impact on history education when they reengineered history standards in the K–12 arena in California by writing and implementing the state’s K–12 History–Social Science Framework. The framework showcases inquiry-based learning throughout the grades, and its creation promoted significant public dialogue. Since adoption of the standards, the group has trained over 5,000 educators statewide on implementation, helping ensure that every student in California receives a quality education in history. 

Equity Award (Individual)

Tiffany George Butler Packer, Florida A&M University

Tiffany Packer’s history project K(no)w Justice, K(no)w Peace (KJKP) reminds its audience of the humanity of victims of state violence and demonstrates the impacts of historical interpretation in public settings. The only exhibit of its kind, KJKP is visited by thousands and engages college students as curators and as leaders; they facilitate local panel discussions on police brutality and its effects on communities of color.

Herbert Feis Award in Public History

Joan Neuberger, University of Texas at Austin

As the driving force behind multiple noteworthy online history projects such as the Not Even Past website, the Thinking in Public project database, and the 15 Minute History podcast, Joan Neuberger’s scholarship harnesses the possibilities of the latest digital platforms for public engagement. Each year her work touches tens of thousands of people, both inside and outside the academy. In addition, she is an enthusiastic mentor and editor for other historians writing for a general audience.

Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, affectionately known by his first name to his students, came to academia after a lengthy first career in medicine. As a respected professor, scholar, and fierce champion of students, he redefines the word “mentor.” In his 15 years at UT Austin, he has built a cohort of graduate students from around the globe. A colleague once said of him, “Every door he unlocks, he holds open for his students.” Called a “force of nature” by others in his department, he inspires passion for history with his favorite academic question, “So what?”

Honorary Foreign Member

Betty Wood, Girton College, University of Cambridge

Betty Wood is reader emerita, faculty of history, at the University of Cambridge, and life fellow, Girton College, Cambridge. She studied at Keele University and the University of London before earning her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. She was one of the founders of the British Group of Early American Historians (BGEAH), which is credited with jump-starting the study of early America in the United Kingdom. Wood taught generations of undergraduate and graduate students, supervising 19 PhD students who now teach on both sides of the Atlantic. The writer of one letter of nomination remarked, “No scholar has done more to develop and sustain the study of early American history in the United Kingdom.”

In addition to her scholarship and teaching, Wood has generously assisted Americans researching and studying in Britain, especially graduate students. She established connections between the BGEAH and continental European scholars of early American history, making for major international linkages, most notably with various universities in Paris. Fittingly, as a pioneer in Atlantic history, she helped bring together historians of the Caribbean and Louisiana and those of Britain, South Carolina, and Georgia.

Her own scholarship on aspects of slavery in the colonial South, especially in Georgia, has been widely praised. She is well known for books and articles on enslaved and indentured women, and her book Come Shouting to Zion (1998), co-authored with Sylvia Frey, is widely recognized as a preeminent work in the religious history of African Americans in the 18th century.

Awards for Scholarly Distinction

Martin E. Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has, in the course of his long career, transformed the study of French and German intellectual history and critical theory. His work is known to historians around the globe, and his scholarship from the 1970s onward is still widely read for its extraordinary erudition, its methodological innovativeness, and its clarity of exposition.

In 1971, the same year that he received his PhD at Harvard, Jay began teaching at Berkeley. Over the next four-plus decades, most of them spent at Berkeley, Jay produced no fewer than nine books (some translated into as many as ten languages), five edited volumes, and more than a hundred articles. Many of these books, starting with the trailblazing and now-classic monograph The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923–1950 (1973) and, most recently, Kracauer l’Exilé (2014), have made the writers and ideas associated with the Frankfurt School intelligible and, indeed, central to the work of historians and humanists more broadly.

Other books have, with extraordinary learnedness, traced centuries of thinking about key concepts, such as experience (Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme, 2004), lying (The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics, 2010), and reason (Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory, 2017), and introduced cutting-edge ways of practicing intellectual history, as in his Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (1993) and Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (1998). Still others, including the influential Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993) and several edited volumes, have established Jay as a leading figure in the field of visual history and theory as well.

This wealth of scholarship has led to Jay receiving major awards, visiting professorships, and invitations to lecture all over the world. He has trained many of the leading intellectual and modern European historians teaching today, as well as shaped the work of generations of Berkeley graduate students in many other disciplines, from comparative literature to film studies. He was also instrumental in developing Berkeley’s interdisciplinary program in critical theory. Jay was honored by his former students with a Festschrift, The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory, in 2009. In his scholarship and teaching, Jay has, in effect, reshaped the concerns and practices of historians across many fields.

Charles S. Maier, Harvard University

Throughout his career, Charles S. Maier, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, has blazed trails in European and global history through works of ambition and erudition. His books, articles, chapters, and edited or co-edited volumes (more than 100 in all) have tackled comparative political economy, modern states, empires, collective memory, and contemporary history.

Maier received his AB (1960) and PhD (1967) from Harvard University, where he then taught history until 1975. Between 1975 and 1980, he held positions at the University of Bielefeld and Duke University. In 1981, Maier returned to Harvard, where he held several positions, including the directorship of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He has held research fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Humboldt Foundation, and has served as an important conduit between historians in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

As a scholar whose career has spanned the closing decades of the Cold War and the long aftermath of its demise, Maier has brought clarity to our understanding of the world we have inherited and now inhabit. From his first forays into European comparative political economy after World War I to scholarship on “German exceptionalism” to more recent accomplishments in the history of empire and territoriality, Maier’s publications have been driven by debates relevant not only to his field but to the entire discipline.

Maier’s influence can be felt today through the work of dozens of historians who claim him as adviser and mentor; their topics of interest include welfare, labor relations, universities, old communists, and international relations. Maier currently co-directs the Initiative on Global History at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, an important source of intellectual support and funding for students and postdoctoral fellows.

Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University

At each juncture of Nell Irvin Painter’s career, she has written disruptive books with lasting legacies. She pioneered methods to recover black lives and built on that work to reinterpret historical subfields.

Her first book, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976), explores migration as a political strategy and recovered what the American Historical Review called “a genuine folk movement . . . undeservedly ignored.” In The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical (1979), Painter and co-author Hudson revealed a hidden history of southern black radicalism that upended genealogies of black resistance. Southern History across the Color Line (2002) made it impossible to write southern history limited to white southerners. Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (1987) reinterpreted the period by moving the focus from expert elites to grassroots activists.

Thus, Painter realigned social history to include African Americans, labor history to include southern communists, southern history to include African Americans as omnipresent actors, and Progressive Era history to focus on the working class and African Americans.

Her astonishingly bold and theoretical Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996) is a meticulous biography, but it is more. Painter integrates fresh conceptions of womanhood, historical memory, slavery, and freedom to speak broadly to major issues in the 19th century. Her latest historical work, A History of White People (2010), is a sweeping analysis of the construction of whiteness over time and place.

An inspiring mentor, Painter changed the worldviews and historical aspirations of her PhD students. They all benefited from her knack of teaching students to rethink what they thought they knew. She also taught them to be fearless.

Painter’s virtuosity and her lasting impact on many fields is an extraordinary legacy. She has remained active in a broad range of professional associations. Her meticulous research and eloquent writing are models for historical works. Her curiosity exemplifies the excitement of discovery that is at the heart of our profession.

2018 Awards for Publications

Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in European History

Hussein Fancy, University of Michigan

The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016)

Hussein Fancy’s The Mercenary Mediterranean elegantly traverses the religious, linguistic, and political boundaries of the medieval Mediterranean, focusing on Muslim cavalry—jenets—recruited by the Christian kings of Aragon. Employing an extraordinary range of sources, Fancy excavates the jenets’ identities, motivations, and religious commitments, arguing for their critical importance to medieval and contemporary debates about faith, violence, and politics. This masterful study underscores the relevance of medieval history to issues of tolerance in Iberia today.

George Louis Beer Prize in European International History

Corey Ross, University of Birmingham

Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017)

Ecology and Power is a remarkably ambitious and timely exploration of 19th- and 20th-century colonial environmental history in Africa and Asia. Corey Ross reconstructs the ecological impact of colonial policies through richly detailed studies of commodities such as cocoa, rubber, copper, and tin. Drawing on social, economic, and environmental history methodologies and colonial and postcolonial narratives, Ecology and Power offers nuanced assessments of the extent of colonial exploitation, the persistence of indigenous knowledge, and the role of contingency.

Jerry Bentley Prize in World History

Erika Rappaport, University of California, Santa Barbara

A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017)

This magisterial study goes far beyond standard commodity histories, integrating tea into the major global story of the modern world: empire and its demise. Erika Rappaport investigates the intertwined natures of empire and capitalism, exploring mass consumer behavior enabled first by governments and then by international businesses and advertising agencies. The book’s source base, chronology, and geographical coverage are breathtaking in scope and richly demonstrate how tea, its growers, and its consumers have shaped the world.

Albert J. Beveridge Award in American History

Camilla Townsend, Rutgers University

Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016)

In this masterful study, Camilla Townsend makes the ancient histories of the Nahuas accessible to contemporary readers. Contributing to a long historiography on postconquest indigenous-language literature, Townsend resurrects historical annals written in the 16th and 17th centuries, includes extensive translated excerpts, and analyzes the Native intellectuals who produced these works and their motivations and methods. Townsend demonstrates how Nahuatl annals preserved indigenous knowledge while responding to colonial processes reshaping Mexican communities.

Paul Birdsall Prize in European Military and Strategic History

Tarak Barkawi, London School of Economics

Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017)

Tarak Barkawi’s Soldiers of Empire examines the composition, training, combat performance, and politics of the British Indian Army in the Second World War. This thought-provoking and elegantly written study blends history and sociology to ask fundamental questions about empires, military cohesion, and the relationship between war and social change. Barkawi’s work is theoretically rich and based on empirical data from a wealth of sources. Lucid and informative, this book pushes us toward a global history of war.

James Henry Breasted Prize in Ancient History

Jeremy Hartnett, Wabash College

The Roman Street: Urban Life and Society in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017)

The Roman Street represents the social and cultural history of urban spaces long neglected in scholarly discussion. Jeremy Hartnett deploys material and textual evidence alongside urban theory and comparison to modern analogues to repopulate the streets of ancient cities. His argument, at once pathbreaking and accessible, reveals the “empty” spaces between buildings as filled with the voices, bodies, and interactions of the people of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome.

Albert B. Corey Prize in Canadian-American Relations or History

Ann M. Little, Colorado State University

The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (Yale Univ. Press, 2016)

In a large pool of excellent submissions, Ann Little’s The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright stood out for its narrative grace and methodological innovation. Little makes a signal contribution to the history of early America by tracing border crossings involving indigenous nations and what would become Canada and the United States from heretofore unexplored perspectives of communities of women.

Raymond J. Cunningham Prize for Undergraduate Journal Article

Heath Rojas, Stanford University (BA, 2018)

“A Model of Revolutionary Regicide: The Role of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Trial of King Louis XVI,” Herodotus (Spring 2018)

Faculty adviser: Keith M. Baker, Stanford University

In “A Model of Revolutionary Regicide,” Heath Rojas argues that French revolutionaries of the early 1790s looked to the outcomes of English history, especially the beheading of Charles I and the Glorious Revolution, for guidance in determining what trying and executing Louis XVI would portend for France’s political future. Steeped in primary sources and deeply engaged with historiography, Rojas’s essay offers a persuasive and original perspective on the French Revolution. 

John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History

Thomas S. Mullaney, Stanford University

The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017)

In this ambitious work, Thomas Mullaney takes readers on a rollicking ride as he surveys the transnational quest to invent a typewriter for the Chinese language. Along the way, he explores the nature and taxonomies of languages and the politics and economics of technological change. What counts as a “modern” writing system, he demonstrates, has been shaped by Orientalist thinking as well as by technological contingency. Sweeping, sophisticated, detailed, significant: this is a great book.

Morris D. Forkosch Prize in British History

Paul Ocobock, University of Notre Dame

An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya (Ohio Univ. Press, 2017)

 

Paul Ocobock’s ingenious study foregrounds age, gender, and generation to understand the political machinations and lived experiences of late imperialism and decolonization. Working with archives and oral testimony from two continents, Ocobock shows how the “elder state” deployed youth for the purposes of governance, only to have it turned against itself in the Mau Mau Rebellion. Ocobock makes a familiar story new and offers portable tools for the work of historians across ages and spaces.

Leo Gershoy Award in Western European History

James Delbourgo, Rutgers University

Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Belknap Press, 2017)

James Delbourgo’s thoroughly researched, beautifully illustrated, and engagingly readable Collecting the World is much more than a biography of the physician and avid collector Hans Sloane (1660–1753). Delbourgo traces with clarity and shrewdness the connections between Sloane’s collections, his global networks of imperial inquiry and acquisition, and his indebtedness to knowledge and wealth derived from the enslaved. This incisive study offers fresh and richly textured insights into the roots of the British Museum and Enlightenment knowledge.

William and Edwyna Gilbert Award for Articles on Teaching History

Leah Shopkow, Indiana University Bloomington

“How Many Sources Do I Need?” The History Teacher 50, no. 2 (February 2017), 169–200.

Leah Shopkow’s article identifies a common problem of practice in history classrooms and describes how she shifted her instruction in order to improve the research and writing of her students. Through her iterative interventions, Shopkow explicitly introduced students to assessing current historiography, selecting evidence, and making an argument. In the article, she includes not only her classroom-based research but also the assignment and rubrics she created.

Friedrich Katz Prize in Latin American History

Lisa Sousa, Occidental College

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico (Stanford Univ. Press, 2017)

Lisa Sousa’s longue durée history of Mexica, Mixtec, Mixte, and Zapotec women has marvelous sources, brilliant and sophisticated analysis, excellent writing, and evident historiographical significance. A unique contribution to indigenous history and gender relations in Latin America, the book demonstrates that women exercised high degrees of freedom in their everyday lives and control over familial relations and their household economy from the 1500s to the 1800s. Sousa offers a methodological model for writing the history of subaltern people.

Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History

Tera W. Hunter, Princeton University

Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press, 2017)

Tera Hunter’s extraordinary history of African American marriage in the United States through slavery and emancipation analyzes the struggles of men and women to define a relationship over which they had almost no control. The book places the marriages of enslaved and free African Americans during the long 19th century at the center of the construction of citizenship and the nation. Hunter’s compelling analysis and exceptional research make this a signal contribution to the historical literature on race relations and gender in the United States.

Martin A. Klein Prize in African History

Kenda Mutongi, Williams College

Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017)

Methodologically innovative and a joy to read, Kenda Mutongi’s Matatu takes a unique ethnographic approach to reconstructing the history of Nairobi’s privately owned urban transport from the 1960s to the present. An interdisciplinary work that mixes examinations of business, urban style, political power, mobility, gender, identity, and postcolonial intrigue, Matatu is distinguished by the rigor and breadth of its research, its contributions to African and global history, and the wit and imagination with which it was conceived and executed.

Littleton-Griswold Prize in US Legal History

Tera W. Hunter, Princeton University

Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press, 2017)

Tera Hunter’s Bound in Wedlock explores marriage and family in African American life through the lens of American legal history. Hunter illustrates how shifting legal meanings of marriage, race, gender, and sexuality shaped ideas about law, labor, citizenship, and national identity before and after the Civil War. Deeply researched and elegantly written, this book traces the entanglements of slavery, racism, and law in the most intimate human relationships and is sure to engage wide audiences across scholarly fields.

Russell Major Prize in French History

Peter Sahlins, University of California, Berkeley

1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017)

Peter Sahlins offers a compelling new reading of French absolutism through the changing perception of animals. Under Louis XIV, allegorical depictions as well as unusual experiments (animal-human blood transfusions, animal physiognomy) civilized royal power by devalorizing animals. As classical naturalism displaced the moral and symbolic entwining of humans and animals, the new Cartesian beast-machine also debased the human. “The year 1688,” Sahlins concludes, “marks a moment when animals became animality, and human nature became, once again, bestial.”

Helen & Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History

Axel Körner, University College London

America in Italy: The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763–1865 (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017)

Italian thinkers and artists of the 18th and 19th centuries perceived America to be a land where barbarism and civilization walked hand in hand. In his imaginatively conceived and wide-ranging interpretation of Italy’s multifarious cultural and intellectual responses to the American experiment as it progressed from the period of the Revolution to the Civil War, Axel Körner surveys the work of some of Italy’s most famous artists and thinkers. He also introduces English-speaking readers to some lesser-known figures, who by the dint of his discerning research have been given the historical prominence they merit.

George L. Mosse Prize in European Intellectual and Cultural History

Yuri Slezkine, University of California, Berkeley

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton Univ. Press, 2017)

For Yuri Slezkine, the Bolsheviks were the People of the Books, a millenarian sect dedicated to literature no less than to Marxist theory. The House of Government, his enthralling saga of the Russian Revolution and its tragic aftermath, is itself a literary tour de force. Through deep research, persuasive analyses, and elegant prose, Slezkine conjures a microcosmic world—a unique residence complex and its revolutionary inhabitants—that expands to dramatize the fate of Soviet utopianism. 

John E. O’Connor Film Award

Documentary: Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart

Tracy Heather Strain, director and producer; Randall MacLowry, producer (Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project, LLC, 2017)

Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart presents the life and work of the author of the 1959 award-winning A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by a black woman to be performed on Broadway. The film goes well beyond the play to contextualize it as part of Hansberry’s family and its multi-generational struggle for racial justice, connecting her work as an artist and writer to her activism across a wide swath of issues, including class, sexuality, and human rights.

Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism

Julia Guarneri, University of Cambridge

Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017)

A vastly rewarding study of the relationship between newspapers and cities from 1880 to 1930, Newsprint Metropolis offers fresh insight into the American urban experience. Its analysis of journalistic practices in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee illuminates how newspapers—including the ethnic press—served and shaped their communities. Beautifully written and illustrated, the book pays special attention to “soft” features such as comic strips, advertisements, and advice columns in the construction of a cosmopolitan consciousness.

James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History

Padraic X. Scanlan, London School of Economics

Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (Yale Univ. Press, 2017)

Freedom’s Debtors is timely, original, and lucid. Its analysis of the political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped the development of Sierra Leone challenges celebratory narratives about the abolition of the slave trade and offers a new account of life in this British colony. Padraic Scanlan’s attention to the agency of West Africans and to “British antislavery in practice” makes this work an important contribution to our understanding of the nature and locus of Atlantic history. 

Premio del Rey

Michelle Armstrong-Partida, University of Texas at El Paso

Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya (Cornell Univ. Press, 2017)

This meticulously researched and documented book uses diocesan visitation records to show that a majority of parish priests in late medieval Catalonia cultivated marriage-like relationships and utilized violence to maintain authority in their communities. Grounded in the history of gender, violence, and the family, and in regional and church history, Defiant Priests challenges commonplace assumptions about clerics in post-Gregorian, post-Lateran IV Europe. Michelle Armstrong-Partida’s evidence and conclusions will be important for Iberianists and medievalists of all stripes.

John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History

Faiz Ahmed, Brown University

Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Harvard Univ. Press, 2017)

Afghanistan Rising restores a largely forgotten history of Muslim modernity that radiates from and converges in late 19th- and early 20th-century Kabul. Unparalleled archival research sustains Faiz Ahmed’s story of diverse actors from Central, South, and West Asia who responded to Afghan rulers’ novel efforts to build an independent Muslim constitutional monarchy. A powerful corrective to dominant narratives, Afghanistan Rising offers a compelling rethinking of the country’s history and of broader Muslim legal and political modernity.

James Harvey Robinson Prize

Bethany Jay, Salem State University

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Boston College

Understanding and Teaching American Slavery (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2016)

Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, a readable, accessible, and thoughtful volume, serves as a superb resource for secondary school and university teachers. The most eminent historians in the field, public historians, curators, education specialists, and archaeologists provide critical overviews of the subject alongside fresh scholarly approaches and an impressive breadth of interdisciplinary ideas. The authors develop innovative pedagogical methods and examine useful primary sources, making this work a valuable contribution for those tasked with teaching this critically important subject.

Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in History of the Jewish Diaspora

Andrew Sloin, Baruch College, CUNY

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indiana Univ. Press, 2017)

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia offers a sophisticated analysis of the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on Jewish society in a borderland defined by its ethnic heterogeneity. Focusing on the intersection of economy and identity formation, Andrew Sloin explores the internal contradictions of the Bolshevik project and the social and economic tensions that resulted from its “New Economic Policy,” providing fertile ground for inter-ethnic tensions and growing anti-Semitism in the 1920s.

Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History

Virtual Angkor

Adam Clulow, Monash University, and Tom Chandler, Monash University

The Virtual Angkor project allows visitors to experience the Cambodian metropolis at its height during the 13th century via immersive virtual reality and 360-degree videos. The richly detailed 3D models and animated populations rival commercial videogaming technology but are situated within a rigorous historical context. With a visual, aural, and embodied argument that moves beyond textual exposition, the project showcases different ways of producing, presenting, and teaching history.

Wesley-Logan Prize in African Diaspora History

Monique A. Bedasse, Washington University in St. Louis

Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2017)

Monique Bedasse draws on her research across three continents and five countries to convincingly show how Tanzania emerged as a key site where Rastafarians produced, practiced, and transformed pan-Africanism and the diaspora community. Her term “trodding diaspora”—the key theoretical intervention of her book—draws from and expands on the Rastafarian term “trod,” or to travel, to explore the distinct ways gender, race, citizenship, politics, and global blackness were produced, validated, and constrained within Tanzania from the 1960s through the 1970s. Jah Kingdom is an ambitious and imaginative book. 

Catherine Denial’s image courtesy of Peter Bailley, Knox College; Tiffany George Butler Packer’s image courtesy of Tiffany Packer; Betty Wood’s image courtesy of Betty Wood; Martin E. Jay’s image courtesy of Rebecca Jay; Charles S. Maier’s image courtesy of Jim Harrison; Nell Irvin Painter’s image courtesy of Nell Irvin Painter, titled Princeton Self-Portrait.