2024 Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize Winners

Randy M. Browne, Joan Flores-Villalobos, Lisa A. Lindsay, 
Elise A. Mitchell, and John Wood Sweet

The Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize in recognition of excellence in the field of Caribbean history. We commend all of the scholars who submitted articles. The prize committee awarded this year’s prize to the authors of three articles: Randy Browne (Xavier University), Lisa A. Lindsay (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and John Wood Sweet (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for “Rebecca’s Ordeal, from Africa to the Caribbean: Sexual Exploitation, Freedom Struggles, and Black Atlantic Biography,” which was published in Slavery & Abolition 43, no. 1 (March 2022): 40–67; Joan Flores-Villalobos (University of Southern California), for “Thrift, Morality, and Migration in the Barbados Savings Bank,” which was published in History Workshop Journal 95 (Spring 2023): 154–74; and Elise A. Mitchell (Princeton University), for “Morbid Crossings: Surviving Smallpox, Maritime Quarantine, and the Gendered Geography of the Early Eighteenth-Century Intra-Caribbean Slave Trade,” which was published in the William & Mary Quarterly 79, no. 2 (April 2022): 177–210. The prizes were awarded at the 55thrd Conference of the ACH, which was hosted by the University of Magdalena in Santa Marta, Colombia, in May 2024.

The prize committee, chaired by Kathryn Dungy (University of New Orleans), announced: This year’s slate of articles was exceptional and the prize committee was impressed with the quality of scholarship. We have chosen to award the 2024 Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize to three articles that stood out from the rest. Each of the awarded articles contributed something unique to the scholarship of Caribbean History in their strength of argument, quality and use of evidence, felicity of prose, style and clarity of expression, and originality and significance for the study of Caribbean history.

In no particular order, the prize committee congratulates Randy Browne (Xavier University), Lisa A. Lindsay (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and John Wood Sweet (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for their article “Rebecca’s Ordeal, from Africa to the Caribbean: Sexual Exploitation, Freedom Struggles, and Black Atlantic Biography,” Slavery & Abolition 43, no. 1 (March 2022): 40–67. This admirable work of co-authorship draws on British, Dutch, and Guianese archives and newspapers to reconstruct how the Middle Passage, sexual predation, and slavery shaped the life of a woman known to us only as Rebecca. Through a painstaking reading of Rebecca’s brief testimony in a Demerara Protector of Slaves report, the authors illuminate how she may have understood her own life story. In particular, they emphasize how West African understandings of kinship and maternity served as a basis for her case for freedom. The authors highlight their impressive archival work in recreating the experiences of a Black woman in the pre-emancipation era. Their work is a model for how to reconstruct the life histories of enslaved people with limited sources.

Joan Flores-Villalobos (University of Southern California)’s “Thrift, Morality, and Migration in the Barbados Savings Bank,” History Workshop Journal 95 (Spring 2023): 154–74. Flores-Villalobos’ work ties together histories of banking, the post-emancipation Caribbean, and 20th-century immigration to the United States to recast the history of ‘thrift’ as a category of colonial dominance. By tracking the way Caribbean migrants acquired the ‘show money’ they were required to produce for U.S. officials, Flores-Villalobos offers a new methodological approach to vernacular practices of banking. By prioritizing relationships and mobility rather than simple economics, Flores-Villalobos’ article takes the often impersonal subject of economic history and personifies it. The subjects covered in this article are not often studied in conjunction with one another, but Flores-Villalobos does so in an innovative way that uncovers different and nuanced stories of post-emancipation Caribbean and US history. This article makes important historiographic and methodological interventions to the field of Caribbean History.

Elise A. Mitchell (Princeton University)’s “Morbid Crossings: Surviving Smallpox, Maritime Quarantine, and the Gendered Geography of the Early Eighteenth-Century Intra-Caribbean Slave Trade,” William & Mary Quarterly 79, no. 2 (April 2022): 177–210. This beautifully written piece explores the intersection of gender and illness in the southeastern Caribbean slave trade to show how they impacted women and girls. By emphasizing the embodied experiences of trafficked Africans, Mitchell proposes a new epistemological approach to the study of the slave trade, one which focuses not on volume and scope but on the social and cultural histories of enslaved people. Making deft use of documents from the Archivo General de Indias, Mitchell carefully reconstructs a lesser-studied branch of the intra-colonial trade. Her attention to the experiences of people subjected to this trade demonstrates that scholars need to look beyond death rates to understand how those who were trafficked understood mortality, illness, and surveillance, with implications for understandings of slavery in the Caribbean and beyond. This article makes an important intervention in the field of Caribbean History.

The Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall prize was launched in 1996 and is a biennial award for the best article in the field of Caribbean History. The award is named jointly for late ACH members Puerto Rican historian Andres Antonio “Tony” Ramos Mattei (1941-1988) and Jamaican historian Neville Hall (1936-1986).

2024 Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize Committee

Kathryn Dungy, Chair
University of New Orleans

Tyesha Maddox
Fordham University

Tessa Murphy
Syracuse University

If you would like more information on the award, please contact the ACH Secretary-Treasurer at achsecretary@gmail.com. The next award will be made at the 57th Annual Conference in 2026. The call for submissions will be issued after the 56th Annual Conference in 2025 and will cover publications in 2024 and 2025.