The 2021 Sharon Harris Book Award

UCHI is honored to announce the winner of the Sharon Harris Book Award for 2021:

Grégoire Pierrot headshot

Grégory Pierrot

Associate Professor of English, UConn

for his book

The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (University of Georgia Press, 2019)

The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture book coverThe Harris Book Award Committee notes, “Grégory Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture is a brilliantly focused and highly original exploration of the political aims of the shifting narratives of exceptional black avengers who rise in violence and retribution against their oppressors. This expansive and in-depth study is, as Pierrot points out, ‘a history of an essential trope of Atlantic modernity.’ Examining literary and historical texts from Haiti to the United States, to Britain and France, from the late seventeenth century forward, this is an expansive and groundbreaking work that explores new scholarly territories in racism and resistance.”

Honorable mention:

Ariel Lambe headshot

Ariel Mae Lambe

Assistant Professor of History, UConn

for her book

No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (UNC Press, 2019)

No Barrier Can Contain It book coverNo Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War offers a fascinating, transnational study of Cuban antifascists and activists during the 1920s and 1930s, in Cuba and beyond. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United States, this well-researched work frames antifascism as an international movement and in so doing contributes not only to the field of Cuban history but also to the history of the Spanish Civil War.”

We thank the award committee for their service. The Sharon Harris Book Award recognizes scholarly depth and intellectual acuity and highlights the importance of humanities scholarship. The 2021 award was open to UConn tenured, tenure-track, emeritus, or in-residence faculty who published a monograph between January 2018 and December 31, 2020.