2026 Award Winners

Thanks to everyone who joined us at our virtual awards ceremony today! The NACBS is thrilled to congratulate our 2026 grant, fellowship, and prize winners. Congratulations to the following awardees!

Undergraduate Essay Prize

Rachel Hendrix, Duke University. “The Female Chief of Colonial Ghana: Gender, British Indirect Rule, and the Invention of New Juaben in the Life of Amba Sewa, 1873-1927.” (nominated by Sarah Balakrishnan)

Focused on a little-studied female ruler named Amba Sewa, this essay is an important work of historical recovery but also a sophisticated analysis of British indirect rule and gendered power in colonial Ghana. Particularly impressive for an undergraduate paper, it is grounded in deep archival research conducted in both Ghana and the United Kingdom. It describes how the colonial state raised, educated, and funded Amba Sewa to serve as an ally who would promote British interests, but also how the princess consistently resisted that control and exerted tremendous agency in protecting the autonomy of her subjects and territory, even in a historical moment when female rule was seen to be in decline. In this way, the essay powerfully illuminates the nuances and contingencies of colonial interactions, and how local rulers could both mobilize and be constrained by gender in their dealings with the colonial state. Beyond its complex analysis, the essay is also beautifully written and offers compelling storytelling and characterization, and its overall strength as a piece of scholarship is attested to by the fact that a revised version has already been accepted for publication by the Journal of West African History.

Jun Wei Lee, University of Notre Dame. “A Jurisprudence of Exception: Regulating Indian Indentured Labor in the Straits Settlements (1867-1884).” (nominated by Paul Ocobock)

This essay looks at the aftermath of an 1864 law restricting labor migration from India, and how colonial administrators in the Straits Settlement framed the Crown Colony as a “site of legal exception” in order to continue importing cheap indentured migrants to work in its sugar plantations. Advancing a nuanced multi-part argument about how that legal exceptionality was established, the essay is deeply grounded in imperial historiography, colonial theory, and an astonishing level of primary source research. The author visited archives not only in London and Oxford, but also Malaysia and Singapore, resulting in a depth of research more typical of advanced graduate or professional historical scholarship. The overall result is a very well written and sophisticated analysis of imperial power dynamics, which illuminates important theoretical questions about states of legal exception and the conflicting logics and incentives of colonial governmentality.

Honorable Mention:  Harper West, Florida State University. “Poor Law and Sanitary Practices in Victorian England: A Comparative Analysis of Local Governments and the Needs of the Poor.” (nominated by Charles Upchurch)

This impressive essay was the product of a senior seminar that was sequenced to follow a semester-long study abroad program in London, in an innovative pedagogical model developed at Florida State University. Based on primary materials gathered at The National Archives during the course in London, the essay combines a thorough reading of existing scholarship on the New Poor Law and Victorian public health concerns with archival records from local sanitation boards, seeking to understand the class-based disparities in how sanitation laws and health protections like sewar construction were applied. A real strength of the analysis is the author’s effort to recover the voices of working-class Londoners, and their perspectives on issues such as workhouse conditions and civil infrastructure, through printed primary sources and by reading government documents against the grain. It is a well argued and very readable essay, and a testament to the value of on-site training in British history in programs like

FSU’s.

MA Essay Prize

Jala Grant, UC Irvine

Jala Grant’s MA thesis “Configurations of Blackness: Stories of British Activists” combines archival research, interviews, and ethnographic participant observation to understand how contemporary Black activists in Britain draw upon, complicate, and reconfigure Blackness as the basis of their activism. Grant contributes to a vital new genealogy of Black British activism by tracing the ways that activists from the 1970s to the present built a trans-Atlantic community through which they negotiated and developed their local modes and languages of resistance.  In the chapter shared with the committee, Grant showed how Black activists differently position themselves in class-based movements, some embracing the universalism of Marxism, while others arguing for the specificity of political Blackness as a working class position. She also examined contemporary Black women’s organizations that center care as a foundational part of anti-racist organizing. Grant situates these projects in a longer history of Black Britons critically interrogating social categories to give voice to their experience, generate analyses, and build political movements. Grant shows not only that the lives of activists were profoundly shaped by global and local intersections of class, race, and gender, but that they used their awareness of this positionality to articulate and fight for their interests. 

NACBS-Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship

Elizabeth Hines, University of Southern Florida

Her fellowship project, currently titled “War in the Time of Anglo-Dutch Empire”, explores Anglo-Dutch relations and transimperial ventures in the early modern period. 

NACBS-Huntington Library Fellowship

Jamie Paterno Ostmann, Durham University

Jamie Paterno Ostmann’s “Making Chocolate in the British Atlantic World: Foodways, Consumption, and Heritage” imaginatively follows the commodity chain from cacao’s sacred, cultural Mesoamerican role to its rapid appearance on the London market where it became an everyday metropolitan product. Between those two points, Paterno Ostmann illuminates, first, cacao’s transplantation to the Caribbean with “an experimental transcontinental labour network” of Indians, enslaved Africans, and indentured Europeans, and second, its Atlantic journey pursued by privateers and navy ships. Far from slowing chocolate’s arrival in London, warfare and piracy facilitated its rapid distribution across brokers, small traders, non-elite shop owners, and ordinary consumers. 

NACBS Pre-Dissertation Travel Grants

Tobin Gold, Indiana University

In “Late Victorian Sex Workplaces: Intimate Labor, Resistance, and Autonomy in Urban Contexts 1864–1924,” Tobin Gold interrogates sex working women’s occupancy of public spaces in London in the mid- to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, reconsidering spaces outside of the brothel as “sex workplaces.” His pre-dissertation work will take him to the National Archives in Kew, the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, and the Wellcome Collection. Gold applies a queer methodological lens to look at the ways that sex workplaces, broadly construed, mapped onto other urban geographies.

Gillian Smith, Stanford University

In “The Royal Hospitals of King Edward VI,” which probes the founding and organization of these institutions of social welfare, Gillian Smith reconsiders central questions about Tudor governance. Unlike the much more extensively studied Poor Laws, which were administered at the parish level, municipally governed hospitals like Christs and St. Bartholomew were some of the earliest forms of state intervention in antipoverty efforts. And by investigating such interventions, Smith also hopes to recover the hitherto marginalized voices of often poor, disabled, and infirm recipients of aid. Her predissertation work will feature visits to the archives of St. Bartholomew and Bethlem Royal Hospitals in London, as well as the Guildhall Library and the London Archives.

NACBS Dissertation Travel Grants

Bruna Cerveira Coutinho, Emory University

In “Liberated African Children Between Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and British Imperialism in Rio de Janeiro (1831-1888),” Bruna Cerveira Coutinho examines the legal category of “Liberated Africans,” the thousands of Africans seized by the Royal Navy and placed in legal purgatory under so-called apprenticeship systems across the Atlantic Word. Cerveira’s dissertation pushes the geographic bounds of British studies into areas of Britain’s informal empire, locating Liberated African children who were placed with British families in Rio de Janeiro. Cerveira’s key intervention tracks the lived experiences of these children across decades, analyzing how their relationships blurred boundaries between exploitation, dependency, and freedom.

Soumyadeep Guha, SUNY Binghampton

In “Against Usury: Discourses on Debt, Cooperatives and Rural Reconstruction between Metropole Britain and Colonial India, 1870-1950,” Soumyadeep Guha queries how credit became a key category for British officials to rethink the colonial economy, particularly in relation to the operations of mahajans, or Indian moneylenders. Based on a strong foundation of research in South Asian archives, Guha reveals agricultural cooperative societies as important sites where a new moral economy was debated in a transnational context, linking cooperative initiatives in India to sites in Britain, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, and beyond.

NACBS Dissertation Fellowship

Abigail Beckett, McGill University

In “Consuming the Body: Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern England and Colonial Worlds, c. 1600-1700,” Abigail Beckett examines the practice of ingesting human remains in its medical, religious, and gendered contexts. While historians have focused on how charges of cannibalism were often used to dehumanize Indigenous peoples in North America and beyond, Beckett’s original and innovative approach provides an important corrective, revealing England’s robust commercial and imperial networks that centered on medicinal cannibalism. Overall, Beckett’s research underscores the contested nature of the human body in early modern England and its empire: as simultaneously sacred and medicinally therapeutic.   

NACBS Fellowship in Black British Studies 

Montaz Marché , University College London

The award will support Dr. Marché’s ongoing research for and the writing of a book titled The Legend of the Black Queen: Blackness, Identity and Gender during the Reign of Queen Charlotte, 1760-1820, which builds on Dr. Marché’s dissertation, “Mapping the Dark and Feminine: Black Women in Eighteenth-Century London,” and previous publications on Black British history during the eighteenth century. This extraordinarily creative book aims to engage a wider public audience in Black British history by using the life and reign Queen Charlotte, who has entered the collective consciousness through the popular Bridgerton series, as an entry point to a larger story of the experiences and racialization of Black woman of humbler backgrounds during the long eighteenth century. Dr. Marché brings a remarkable level of expertise and research experience to the project and is uniquely suited to expand upon the seminal scholarship of Gretchen Gerzina on this under-studied period of Black British history. 

Runner Up: Siza Dube, University of Bristol

Dube’s dissertation in progress, “‘Mothers of a Community’: How Black Women Resist, Reimagine Futures and Create Community” examines how Black British women organized around issues of reproductive justice and inequalities in the allocation of welfare benefits during the 1970s and 1980s. In returning to the campaigns against Depo-Provera, Dube demonstrates that Black women understood their activism as a form of anti-imperialism connected to the anticolonial struggle in Zimbabwe and opposition to apartheid in South Africa. As part of the research for the project, Dube is conducting oral history interviews with Black women activists that will be stored at the Black Cultural Archives for the use of future researchers. Dube’s project bridges the histories of Britain and (post-)colonial Africa, and they will use the funds from the award to conduct archival research in Zimbabwe. Dube is an experienced public historian and also plans to use a small portion of the award to stage community workshops and a public exhibition in collaboration with the Black Cultural Archives.

Runner Up: Tyler Isaiah Campbell, Yale University

Campbell’s dissertation, “Stay Black & Live: The Making and Unmaking of the Black Martyr,” explores how Black lives and deaths accrue meaning and become symbols, vehicles for expressions of grief, and the source of political demands through particular media, such as poems, artistic performances, protest imagery, and livestreams, posts, and reposts on online platforms. Campbell will use the funds from the award to further develop the transatlantic scope and Black British component of the project as they revise and expand the dissertation for publication as a book, tentatively entitled After the Black Atlantic: Black British Poetics and the Digital Circuits of Mourning. Responding to Paul Gilroy’s recent observation that diasporic connections increasingly operate through new circuits and in new registers in the digital age, Campbell’s intervention is as timely as it is theoretically inventive. Focusing particularly on the Ghanaian British writer Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet, Campbell interrogates how Atlantic histories of slavery, empire, and migration imbue both physical and virtual geographies of Black British subject formation, from the home counties and the suburb of Essex to online platforms and feeds, beyond the conventional focus on London.

Judith R. Walkowitz Article Prize

Taylor M. Moore for “‘Living Fossils’: Anatomies of Race and Reproduction in Modern Egypt,” in The American Historical Review

Moore’s article uses the figure of Henhenit, the young Nubian woman who had been queen consort and princess in the court of King Mentuhotep II in ancient Egypt to trace the history of anthropology, gynecology,  and comparative anatomy in Egypt in the early twentieth century, a period that bridged the end of Britain’s formal control and the early stages of Egyptian independence. Moore explores the ways that British and Egyptian scientists’ study of racialized reproductive female bodies – both ancient and contemporary – illuminates the intersections of medical with imperial, colonial, and national histories. Through a focus on work of the Qasr al-‘Aini Medical School, entangled as it was in what Moore calls the “nested colonialisms of nineteenth-century Egypt” (26), the article not only contributes to the expansion of the history of “race science” beyond the west but also makes clear the material and gendered cost of the imperial and national “race work” done by anatomical science (28), a cost born in large part by “Egyptian mothers in the clinic and on the operating table” (46). This is a compelling and timely account that draws in creative ways on multi-lingual scientific and museological archive.

Walter D. Love Article Prize

Tawny Paul, “Involuntary Investors in British State-Building: Seamen’s Tickets and the Financial Revolution, c. 1700-1760,” Past & Present (2025)

In an article notable for its originality and literary grace, Tawny Paul explains how the Financial Revolution operated on the ground, approached through the eyes of mariners, their families, and other ordinary Britons dealing with the necessities of life. This study deftly explores the eighteenth-century market for “seamen’s tickets,” wage debts owed by the British government to sailors, and what role these tickets played in innovations in credit and the processes of state building. In drawing scholarly attention to these tickets, Paul does not just demonstrate the social depth of the Financial Revolution but also shows how the involuntary contributions of thousands of seamen and their family members through the ticket market were fundamental to making this revolution possible. The committee appreciated the article’s archival richness, evidentiary innovation, intellectual sophistication, and compassion for its non-elite subjects. We all agreed that Paul’s fresh take on the Financial Revolution will have a lasting impact on the social and economic history of the eighteenth-century British world.

Honorable Mention: Martha Groppo, “‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’: Rural realities, professional ideals, and the forgotten history of cottage nursing c. 1880-1939,” Rural History (2025): 172-92.

Martha Groppo’s nuanced and lucidly-written article draws attention to a little-known movement in the history of medicine: cottage nursing. With an even-handed sensitivity to multiple sides, Groppo explains how debates over nursing standards pitted the logistical realities of British rural healthcare needs against idealistic notions of providing “the same standard of care to all.” The committee appreciated the article’s deep archival grounding, its attention to peripheral peoples and regions, and its confrontation of traditional frameworks of modernity. The committee also thought the article was remarkably timely at a time in which healthcare systems in both Britain and North America tackle similarly painful questions about geographic allocations of resources and minimum standards of care.

John Ben Snow Book Prize

Joint winners:

Lindsay O’Neill, The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press)

 and

Justin Roberts, Fragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645-1720 (Cambridge University Press)

In The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery, Lindsay O’Neill tells the story of two African men who set out on a British ship from Maputo to London in 1716 and were ensnared in the slave trade. Through impressive archival sleuthing, O’Neill traces and contextualizes a perverse picaresque journey around the globe which features treachery, enslavement, tragedy, and freedom. O'Neill's microhistory engages vital questions about the history of the eighteenth-century British world through the story of two individuals who were caught up in global forces at times beyond their control, but who worked to shape their own destinies. O'Neill's ability to discern their agency makes this work much more than a tale of victimization, even though (as the author poignantly notes) we do not know the original names of these young men. Throughout, O’Neill grapples scrupulously and judiciously with profound questions about evidence and the nature of history itself. The book is also beautifully written, from its disturbing and evocative first paragraph to its moving final sentence. O’Neill’s erudite, eloquent, and compact work is admirably accessible and simultaneously provides a new global perspective on the intertwined histories of slavery and the early modern British world.

Justin Roberts’s book, Fragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645-1720, recasts the early history of empire as a violent global history of enslaved labor. It also challenges the notion of a distinct Atlantic history. In place of the familiar triangular geography of Britain, Africa and the Americas, Roberts describes a more expansive vision of empire which connects the English tropics from the Caribbean to Sumatra and Surinam, and everywhere in between. As English intruders grappled with the environmental and geopolitical challenges of tropical locales, Roberts argues, they devised a new model of empire that placed enslaved labor at its center. Fragile Empire offers a pathbreaking analysis of that process and charts a new origin story for the British empire. The global perspective is vital for the argument, demonstrating recurring patterns in diverse locales and showing the importance of connecting the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Resting on prodigious archival research and in fruitful dialogue with an extensive secondary literature, Fragile Empire models new approaches to the study of slavery and empire.

Stansky Book Prize

Julia Stephens, Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton University Press)

Worldly Afterlives is a deeply original collage of mobile lives, diasporas, and empires and a profound reflection on the practices and materiality of history. Julia Stephens reorients diasporic histories beyond national or ethnic frames by finding women in patriarchal genealogies and historical traces haunting everyday objects across the Indian Ocean and the British Empire. The fluid identities in these diasporas are told in a series of microhistories sparked by physical touch or emotional connection with photographs for identity documents, family heirlooms, museum artifacts, or threads that bind archival records. The family researchers Stephens encounters in archives and online forums become collaborators in the creation of her collage, as well as their own assemblages of family memories. This methodologically innovative, theoretically sophisticated, and ethically self-aware study explores the limitations of conventional genealogies and the possibilities of new, diasporic archives on social media. Stephens’ conversations with her students as well as the descendants of the people profiled in the book unsettle conventional expectations of how history should be written and will prompt ongoing dialogue about the writing of history in the future.