William Sanders Scarborough Prize Winners
2022
- Autumn Womack, Princeton University, for The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2022)
- Honorable mention: Irvin Hunt, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2022)
- Honorable mention: Bettina A. Judd, University of Washington, Seattle, for Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern Univ. Press, 2022)
2021
- Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Georgetown University, for The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2021)
- Honorable mention: Shanna Greene Benjamin, Wake Forest University, for Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2021)
- Honorable mention: Elizabeth McHenry, New York University, for To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship (Duke Univ. Press, 2021)
2020
- Joshua Bennett, Dartmouth College, for Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard Univ. Press, 2020)
- Honorable mention: Sylvia Jenkins Cook, University of Missouri, St. Louis, emerita, for Clothed in Meaning: Literature, Labor, and Cotton in Nineteenth-Century America (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2020)
- Honorable mention: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus, University of Southern California, for Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2020)
2019
- James Edward Ford III, Occidental College, for Thinking through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics (Fordham Univ. Press, 2019)
- Honorable mention: Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University, for Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W. W. Norton, 2019)
- Honorable mention: Therí Alyce Pickens, Bates College, for Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke Univ. Press, 2019)
2018
- Darius Bost, University of Utah, for Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2018)
- Honorable mention: Cheryl Finley, Spelman College, for Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton Univ. Press, 2018)
- Honorable mention: Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2018)
2017
- Sonya Posmentier, New York University, for Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2017)
- C. Riley Snorton, University of Chicago, for Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2017)
- Honorable mention: John Levi Barnard, College of Wooster, for Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017)
- Honorable mention: Fred Moten, New York University, for Black and Blur (Duke Univ. Press, 2017)
2016
- GerShun Avilez, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2016)
- Honorable mention: Robert Fitzgerald Reid-Pharr, Graduate Center, City University of New York, for Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-humanist Critique (New York Univ. Press, 2016)
2015
- Uri McMillan, University of California, Los Angeles, for Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York Univ. Press, 2015)
- Honorable mention: Nadia Ellis, University of California, Berkeley, for Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Duke Univ. Press, 2015)
- Honorable mention: Angela Naimou, Clemson University, for Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (Fordham Univ. Press, 2015)
2014
- Anthony Reed, Yale University, for Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2014)
- Honorable mention: Mary Helen Washington, University of Maryland, College Park, for The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Columbia Univ. Press, 2014)
2013
- Samantha Pinto, Georgetown University, for Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (New York Univ. Press, 2013)
- Honorable mention: Francesca T. Royster, DePaul University, for Sounding like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2013)
2012
- Erica R. Edwards, University of California, Riverside, for Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2012)
- Honorable mention: Sara E. Johnson, University of California, San Diego, for The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Univ. of California Press, 2012)
2011
- Stephanie Leigh Batiste, University of California, Santa Barbara, for Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance (Duke Univ. Press, 2011)
- Honorable mention: Meta DuEwa Jones, University of Texas, Austin, for The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2011)
2010
- Lawrence P. Jackson, Emory University, for The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton Univ. Press, 2010)
2009
- Monica L. Miller, Barnard College, for Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Duke Univ. Press, 2009)
2008
- Magdalena J. Zaborowska, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke Univ. Press, 2008)
- Honorable mention: Daphne Lamothe, Smith College, for Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
2007
- Candice M. Jenkins, Hunter College, for Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2007)
2006
- Jacqueline Goldsby, University of Chicago, for A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006)
2005
- Alexander G. Weheliye, Northwestern University, for Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke Univ. Press, 2005)
2004
- Jean Fagan Yellin, Pace University, for Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Civitas, 2004)
2003
- Joanna Brooks, University of Texas, Austin, for American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford Univ. Press, 2003)
- Honorable mention: Thadious M. Davis, University of Pennsylvania, for Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner's Go Down Moses (Duke Univ. Press, 2003)
- Honorable mention: Susan Gillman, University of California, Santa Cruz, for Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003)
2002
- Maurice O. Wallace, Duke University, for Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Duke Univ. Press, 2002)
2001
- Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Princeton University, for Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early-Nineteenth-Century Black America (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000)