Prizes, Awards & Accomplishments

Two Woodson alumni and one Woodson fellow were honored at the 2008 African Studies Association Meeting, held in Chicago on Nov. 13–16:

• John Thornton (’83) and Linda Heywood were co-winners of the Melville J. Herskovits Award for their recent book, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Parker Shipton (‘89) was also a co-winner of the Herskovits prize for his book, The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa (Yale University Press, 2007).
• Kristin Phillips (’09) was named the 2008 recipient of the ASA Graduate Student Paper Prize for “Consuming the State: Hunger, Healing, and Citizenship in Rural Tanzania.” Kristin’s paper will be published in an upcoming issue of the African Studies Review.

In addition, a number of Woodson alumni and fellows were selected to deliver papers at this year’s ASA meeting including Tejumola Olaniyan (‘89), Zoe Strother (’90), Charles Bwenge (‘02), Jeff Fleisher (‘02), Jesse Shipley (’02), Todd Cleveland (‘08), Kristin Phillips (’09), and Olubukola Gbadegesin (’10).

Other Honors, Fellowships and Appointments

Lawrie Balfour, a Woodson faculty affiliate and Associate Professor in UVa’s Department of Politics, is spending the year at Princeton University as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Associate Professor for Distinguished Teaching at the University Center for Human Values. While at Princeton, Lawrie will teach a course on the politics of remembering slavery, offered jointly through the Dept. of Politics and the Center for African American Studies. She will also work on two book manuscripts: one on Du Bois’ political thought, and another on reparations.

Yarimar Bonilla (Woodson fellow ’08) has been appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UVa. Yari’s dissertation is titled, A Striking Past: Labor and the Politics of History in Guadeloupe.

Melvin Patrick Ely (Woodson fellow ‘85), William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary has won several prizes for his recent book, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; Vintage Books, 2005). These awards include: the Bancroft Prize, the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award for best book on American history (US, Canada, or Latin America), the AHA's Wesley-Logan Prize for best book on the history of the African diaspora, and the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction. The book was also named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review and the Atlantic Monthly. It was the runner-up for the Mark Lynton Prize in History, a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the John Hope Franklin Prize, and a selected title of the History Book Club.

Roquinaldo Ferreira, Assistant Professor in History and African-American and African Studies at UVa, has received a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). While on leave, he will be affiliated with the Centre d’Etudes du Bresil et de l'Atlantique Sud at LUniversit‚ Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), where he put the finishing touches on his book manuscript, provisionally entitled Bonds of Captivity: Brazil and the Transformations of Atlantic Slaving in Angola, ca. 1700–ca.1830. Roque’s book is under contract with Cambridge University Press. During 2008–2009, Roque is scheduled to give talks at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of Cambridge, the Center for Advanced Studies of African Society in Johannesburg, l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and the University of Texas at Austin.

Tera Hunter (Woodson fellow ’87) has been promoted to full professor in the Department of History, Princeton University. Tera also holds an appointment in Princeton’s Center for African-American Studies. Her work focuses on African-American women and labor in the South during the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

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