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Feature
Tampa Native Is Finalist For Prestigious Award
Tampa native Dr. Alexis
Wells-Oghoghomeh is one of three finalists for the pres- tigious Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The announce- ment of the three finalists was made on Tuesday, July 26, 2022.
Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition announced the finalists for the twenty-fourth annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African American ex- perience.
Jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resist- ance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, this annual prize of $25,000 recognizes the best book written in English on slavery, resist- ance, and/or abolition pub- lished in the preceding year.
The finalists are: Tiya Miles for “All That She Car- ried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keep- sake” (Random House); Jen- nifer L. Morgan for “Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capi- talism in the Early Black At- lantic” (Duke University Press); and Alexis Wells- Oghoghomeh for “The Souls of Womenfolk: The Re- ligious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South” (University of North Carolina Press).
The winner will be an- nounced following the Dou- glass Prize Review Committee meeting in the fall, and the award will be presented at a celebration in New York City in February, 2023.
From a total of 80 sub- missions, the finalists were selected by a jury of scholars that included Jeff Forret (Chair), Professor of History at Lamar University; Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History at Howard Univer- sity; and Sasha Turner, As- sociate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.
Spanning the sixteenth century to the cusp of the Civil War, and from West Africa to the Lower South, Dr. Wells-Oghogho- meh’s “The Souls of Wom- enfolk” offers an expansive and much needed interven-
DR. ALEXIS WELLS-OGHOGHOMEH
by the Gilder Lehrman Insti- tute of American History and Gilder Lehrman Center in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring out- standing accomplishments. The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the one-time slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, re- formers, writers, and orators of the nineteenth century.
Dr.Wells-Oghogho- meh is a professor at Stan- ford. She is the daughter of Sentinel publisher, Ms. Sybil Kay Andrews and Alfred Wells and the granddaughter of Mrs. Glo- ria Andrews.
She is married to Akerho Oghoghomeh and the mother of Ekwheri and Esezi and they live in Los Angeles.
tion in the literature on reli- gion, slavery, and gender.
By thinking through how motherhood, reproduction, and female knowledge net- works intersected and rede- fined the spiritual lives of enslaved women and the broader community of en- slaved people, the book shifts scholarly attention away from overly masculinized versions of Black religiosity to expand our understanding of slavery and gender forma- tion.
Overcoming the chal- lenges of discerning the ways that the enslaved understood themselves or made sense of their experiences, Dr. Wells-Oghoghomeh’s careful reading of enslaved people’s customs and sym- bols offers insights into the spiritual and religious as- pects of how enslaved women interpreted and managed such predictable and com- mon afflictions as infant death.
In looking closely at the spiritual meanings and med- ical dimensions of enslaved women’s rites and rituals, “The Souls of Womenfolk” takes seriously enslaved peo- ple’s practices that slave own- ers routinely dismissed as superstition.
It is an important work of grassroots religiosity that complicates the findings of scholars preoccupied with in- stitutional expressions of re- ligion.
The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established
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