CONGRATULATIONS TO PROFESSOR AND SCA DEPARTMENT CHAIR JENNIFER MORGAN ON ACCEPTING THE 2022 OAH MARY NICKLISS PRIZE THIS PAST WEEKEND!
2022 Organization of American Historians Conference on American History
Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History for the most original book in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History (including North America and the Caribbean prior to 1776)
Prize Committee:
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Western Carolina University, Chair
Heather Miyano Kopelson, University of Alabama
Brianna Theobald, University of Rochester
WINNER: Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press).
"In Reckoning with Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan excavates the lives, decisions, and epistemological shifts behind the technologies—ship manifests, bills of sale, and merchant records—of commerce, trade, and capitalism. What she uncovers is that enslaved African women were foundational to the early centuries of the slave trade, the rise of capitalism, and ideas of modernity itself. It was on their bodies, subjected to violence and subsequent erasure, that the calculus of commodification occurred, rendering women in life and in the official records kinless, without rational economic minds, without sexual mores, and without history. And yet, their love for their children, their resistance, and their decisions provide the counternarrative to racial capitalism. Their stories, so expertly revealed and crafted by Morgan, expose the calculations of capitalists without replicating that legacy in the history we tell. Her work promises to transform how we understand the Black Atlantic, the rise of racial capitalism, and the world we live in today."
To read more about the OAH Annual Meeting and Awards, click here.
