Awards - Previous Winners
Previous Winners
Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize and Cheryl A. Wall Graduate Student Paper Prize
2023
dr. catherine knight steele, “Black Feminist Pleasure on TikTok: An Ode to Hurston’s ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression”
Winner, Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize
Dr. Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. There she directs the Black Communication and Technology lab and the graduate program in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities. Dr. Steele studies race and media, specifically focusing on Black discourse, technology, and social media. Catherine’s research on the Black blogosphere, digital discourses of resistance and joy, and digital Black feminism has been published in such journals as Social Media + Society, Information, Communication and Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She is the author of Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality (Routledge 2023) and Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press 2021), which examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S and was the 2022 winner of the Association of Internet Research Nancy Baym Book Award and Diamond Anniversary Book Award for the National Communication Association.
Honorable Mention, Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize
While completing her Master’s in Kinesiology, Tori used qualitiative research methodologies to understand how black women perceived the Body Mass Index (BMI) and how that perception influenced their engagement in physical activity. As she continues as a Doctoral candidate in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, her reasearch examines the socio-historical production of knowledge about health, and how that knowledge constructs and impacts contemporary understandings of race, gender, and obesity. As being “healthy” is a normalized concept that often goes unequestioned, Tori is particulary interested in re-creating health knowledge by centering anti-racist research methods. Tori brings expertise in qualitative methodology, critical theory, social epidemiology, and health equity.
Kéla B. Jackson, “Un-becoming: Deborah Roberts on Black Girlhood"
Winner, Cheryl A. Wall Graduate Student Paper Prize
Kéla Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University. Her work exists at the intersection of art history, visual culture, Black feminist and girlhood studies. Her dissertation, “UnBecoming: The Poetics of Rupture in Visions of Black Girlhood,” examines contemporary artists Faith Ringgold, Deborah Roberts, and Clarissa Sligh’s respective interventions within the space of Black girlhood. The dissertation reads ruptural aesthetics—collage, constructed photography, and quilting—as evincing the fracturing and remaking of narratives that contain Black girls.
Kéla’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, Terra Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institutions. Her work has been published by Boston Art Review, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Harvard Art Museums, and Vanderbilt University Press. Kéla is a graduate of Spelman College (c/o 2019) where she studied art, curatorial studies, and African Diaspora studies.
paul michael thomson, "Lorraine Hansberry & the Kitchen(ette) Sink”
Honorable Mention, “Lorraine Hansberry & the Kitchen(ette) Sink”
Paul Michael Thomson is an interdisciplinary scholar, theatre artist, and co-founder of The Story Theatre, 501(c)(3) in Chicago, IL. Currently pursuing his PhD in Afro-American Studies and a graduate certificate in Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Paul Michael explores the intersections of creative practice and Black liberation, with a particular investment in incipient Black Feminist aesthetics and queer representations in the drama of the Black Arts Movement. Other research interests include Black Feminisms, 20th and 21st century Black drama, Black women's literature, and non-hierarchical structures in artistic institutions. He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Africana Studies, a BFA in Acting, and minors in Spanish & Art History from the Honors College at the University of Arizona. He has received fellowships from the New York Public Library, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, and the Flinn Foundation. To engage more, please visit paulmichaelthomson.com.
2021
Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, “Chop Suey Surplus: Chinese Food, Sex, and the Political Economy of Afro-Asia”
Winner, Inaugural Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize (2021)
Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of race, debt, and technology. Dr. Goffe is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her research is rooted in literature and theories of labor that center Black feminist intersections with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Born in the U.K. and based in New York City, Dr. Goffe’s work negotiates the haunted legacy of African and Asian Atlantic crossings. She studied English at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. She is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, a collective on race, technology, and ecology and Afro-Asia Group, a collective that centers the futurity of African and Asian diasporas. Her writing has been published in Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and Boston Review. Dr. Goffe is a founding co-editor of the new peer-reviewed Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies (Pluto). She is also the co-editor of the Global Black Histories and Theory section of Public Books.
Drs. Danielle roper and traci-ANN wint, “The Tambourine Army: Sonic Disruptions and the Politics of Respectability”
Honorable Mention, Inaugural Toni Cade Bambara Article Prize (2021)
Danielle Roper is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D in Spanish and Portuguese and a MA in Performance Studies from New York University. Her work on race and queer performance, visual culture, and feminist activism in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean has appeared in GLQ, Latin American Research Review, Small Axe and elsewhere. She is the curator of the virtual exhibition: Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive. Roper is a Thomas J. Watson Fellow (2006). She is from Kingston, Jamaica.
Traci-Ann Wint is an Assistant Professor in Africana Studies at Smith College. She holds a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies and an MA in Anthropology both from The University of Texas at Austin, and is a certified instructional designer focused on universally inclusive pedagogy and technology. Her academic writing and poetry on race and gender in the Caribbean, postcoloniality, tourism, feminist activism, and visual media have appeared in Small Axe, The Caribbean Writer, and Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies among others. She is from Kingston, Jamaica.
naomi simmons-thorne, “We Shift, We Fall, We Never Lose Our Way: Black Feminist Theory and its Wayward Futures”
Winner, Inaugural Cheryl A. Wall Graduate Student Paper Prize
Naomi Simmons-Thorne is a graduate student at the University of South Carolina where she studies English and teacher ed, qualitative research, and foundations/philosophy of education. Her work seeks to explore the schooling experiences of Black and (post-)colonial subjects, Black pedagogical thought and history, social reproduction in schools, and curricular strategies for emancipatory social justice movements. Her work draws on critical social theory, semiotics and cultural studies, postmodern marxism, and black feminist thought. Naomi is U.S. born of Trinidadian descent and identifies as a Black transgender woman.
Heather Butina-Sutton, “Yoruba Market Women in the atlantic world: Tracing profits and practices from 1600 to 1970
Honorable Mention, Inaugural Cheryl A. Wall Graduate Student Paper Prize (2021)
Heather Butina-Sutton is a History Ph.D. student at the University of Houston, where she is also completing a graduate certificate in Women Studies with the Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Department. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Cultural Anthropology, also from the University of Houston. Her research centers on Black entrepreneurship in the colonial Atlantic World, specifically the culture of mobile street vending. By examining the activities of female hucksters transnationally, she demonstrates that West Africans and their descendants were able to utilize their shared cultural knowledge of market selling to negotiate their enslavement and influence the socio-economic development of the cities in which they lived. You can follow her on Twitter at @htbsutton.