MAAH Stone Winners

Thulani Davis

The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom

Thulani Davis is a professor and a Nellie Y. McKay Fellow in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-first Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots. A poet and longtime writer for theater, film, and journalism, Davis has been a recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers Award, a PEW Foundation National Theatre Artist Residency, and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York City.

Howard W. French

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

Howard W. French is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former New York Times bureau chief for the Caribbean and Central America, West and Central Africa, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The author of five books, French lives in New York City. For more information, visit his website at howardwfrench.com.

Daphne A. Brooks

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound

Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent:  Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910, winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR and Jeff Buckley’s Grace.

Brooks has published numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture. She is the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011), both of which received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing.  Brooks recently published liner notes essays for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times deluxe box set and the Omnivore Recording reissue of Nina Simone’s Little Girl Blue. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, Pitchfork and other press outlets.

Read NY Times Book Review, In ‘Liner Notes for the Revolution,’ a History of American Music With Black Women at Its Center

Jelani M. Favors 
Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism 

Jelani M. Favors is Associate Professor of History at Clayton State University. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from The Ohio State University and earned a Bachelors degree in History from North Carolina A&T State University. He is a native of Winston-Salem, NC and currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Favors' work and research has appeared in several media outlets including The Atlantic, The Chronicle for Higher Education, C-SPAN, and The Conversation. Shelter in a Time of Storm has also won the 2020 Lillian Smith Book Award, and was one of five Finalists for the 2020 Pauli Murray Award.

Julius S. Scott 
The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution 

Julius S. Scott was born in Marshall, Texas, where his parents attended Wiley College.  Scott majored in history at Brown University, from which he received the A.B. with honors in 1977.  He earned his Ph.D. in history from Duke University in 1986.  He has served as a faculty member at Rice University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Duke University, New York University, and the University of Michigan, where he has taught early modern Atlantic, early American, and African American history since 1995. Verso Books published The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, in 2018. 

“The Common Wind is vital for how we think about so many things including: diasporic consciousness, the development of Black political life during slavery, as well as the early emergence of clandestine education among Black people.” — Jarvis R. Givens, PhD, Juror

Tera W. Hunter
Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free
Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century

Dr. Tera Hunter is a professor in the History Department and African-American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in African-American history and gender in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research has focused on African American women and labor in the South during that period. She has received numerous fellowships and grants including a Mary I. Bunting Institute fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship from the Center for Research on Women at University of Memphis, and a Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Museum of American History. Bound in Wedlock is her 2nd book; she is also the author of To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War.