Announcing THE 2020 ANGELA Y. DAVIS PRIZE from the American Studies Association

The Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship recognizes scholars who have applied or used their scholarship for the “public good.” This includes work that explicitly aims to educate the lay public, influence policies, or in other ways seeks to address inequalities in imaginative, practical, and applicable forms.

MICHELLE DANIEL (JONES), the 2020 prize winner, is an interdisciplinary scholar activist, NYU doctoral candidate, writer, and artist excavating the collateral consequences of criminal convictions for people and families directly impacted by mass incarceration, in addition to participating in a scholarly project challenging the narratives of the history of women’s prison with a group of incarcerated scholars. 

As one of her fellow students states, "A day doesn’t go by that I haven’t learned something new from her. ... Not only through her ability to do so formally, but also through the living example present in whatever task she undertakes. ... I have never known another person who can create something magnificent out of seemingly nothing the way she can and does."