UK History Professor Chairs Yale Panel Selecting Prize for Scholarship of the African American Experience

By Richard LeComte 

photo of a professor
Amy Murrell Taylor

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Amy Murrell Taylor, the T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of history in the University of Kentucky's College of Arts and Sciences, is chairing the panel selecting the 26th Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition gives the prize, which recognizes a book addressing the history of slavery, resistance and abolition. 

Taylor’s book “Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps” received the prize in 2019. 

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center established the Frederick Douglass Book Prize in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field. The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), an enslaved person who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers and orators of the 19th century.  

The winner will be announced in the fall. The finalists for this year’s prize are: 

  • Kerri K. Greenidge for “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family” (Liveright Publishing Corp.). 

  • Sara E. Johnson for “Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World” (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press). 

  • Emily A. Owens for “Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans” (University of North Carolina Press).