Prize Winners

SHEAR Book Prize for 2023

The 2023 SHEAR Book Prize went to Sharon Ann Murphy for Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (University of Chicago Press). Sharon Ann Murphy is a professor of History at Providence College.

James H. Broussard First Book Prize for 2023

The 2023 James Broussard Best First Book Prize went to two authors this year. 

Elizabeth Ellis for The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (University of Pennsylvania Press). Elizabeth Ellis is an associate professor of History at Princeton University.

Whitney Nell Stewart for This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (University of North Carolina Press). Whitney Nell Stewart is an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Dallas.

James Bradford Biography Prize for 2023

The 2023 James Bradford Biography Prize went to David Waldstreicher for The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (Macmillan Publishers). David Waldstreicher is a professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Mary Kelley Prize for 2023

The 2023 Mary Kelley Prize went to Kathleen Brown for Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition (University of Pennsylvania Press). Kathleen Brown is a professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Nicholas L. Syrett received an Honorable Mention for The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (New Press). Nicholas Syrett is a professor of History at the University of Kansas.