The African Studies Association (ASA) invites publishers to nominate titles for the ASA Best Book Prize. The ASA presents the ASA Best Book Prize to the author of the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year. The winner of the ASA Best Book Prize is announced each year at the ASA Annual Meeting, where he or she receives an honorarium of $500. A list of the finalists for the Prize is published in the Annual Meeting program. Past winners have included some of the most prominent names in African Studies.
Eligibility
Nominations for the ASA Best Book Prize are made directly by publishers who may nominate as many separate titles in a given year as they desire. Nominations must be original non-fiction scholarly monographs published in English and distributed in the United States. The subject matter must significantly deal with Africa and/or related areas (Cape Verde, Madagascar, or Indian Ocean Islands off the East African coast). Works that are not eligible include collections and compilations, proceedings of symposia, new editions of previously published books, bibliographies, and dictionaries. Only books with a 2024 copyright are eligible for the 2025 ASA Best Book Prize.
Nomination
Nominations for the 2025 award cycle open soon. Nominations must be postmarked on or before April 30, 2025.
You must represent a publisher to nominate a book.
To nominate a publication, please fill out the nomination form below indicating the book title and author(s), publisher you represent, year of copyright (must be the previous calendar year), and email address. Please send one copy of each title to each committee member.
Please contact the African Studies Association at members@africanstudies.org with questions.
2025 Committee
TBD, Chair
TBD
Corrie Decker
Michael Nelson
Sheila Petty
Ben Twagira
Submit a Nomination for the ASA Best Book Prize
Rudolf Gaudio (Chair)
(all pronouns welcome)
School of Natural and Social Sciences
Purchase College, State University of New York
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, NY 10577
rudolf.gaudio@purchase.edu
Dept. of History
University of California, Davis
2216 Social Sci. and Humanities Bldg.
One Shields Ave
Davis, CA 95616
crdecker@ucdavis.edu
History Dept.
Barnard College
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
ageorge@barnard.edu
Monmouth College
700 East Broadway
Monmouth, IL 61462-1998
mbnelson@monmouthcollege.edu
241 Shannon Rd
Regina, Saskatchewan
S4S 5H8 Canada
sheila.petty@uregina.ca
Ben Twagira
History Dept.
Hollander Hall, RM 114
85 Mission Park Drive
Williamstown, MA 01267
bt7@williams.edu
ASA Best Book Prize Winners (1965-Present)
2024
Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures (Duke University Press, 2023)
2023
Mariana P. Candido, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
2022
Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021)
2021
Naminata Diabate, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020)
2020
Adom Getachew, World Making After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-determination, (Princeton University Press)
2019
Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton University Press)
2018
Lisa A. Lindsay, Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (University of North Carolina Press)
2017
Fallou Ngom, Muslims Beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridiyya (Oxford University Press)
2016
Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Duke University Press)
2015
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (University of Chicago Press)
2014
Allen and Barbara Isaacman, Dams, Displacement and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965-2007 (Ohio University Press)
2014
Carola Lentz, Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa (Indiana University Press)
2013
Derek Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935-1972 (Cambridge University Press)
2012
Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton University Press)
2011
G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World
(Cambridge University Press)
2011
Neil Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda (University of Virginia Press)
2010
Trevor H.J. Marchand, The Masons of Djenne (Indiana University Press)
2010
Adeline Masquelier, Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town (Indiana University Press)
2009
Sylvester Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (University of Rochester Press)
2008
Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge University Press)
2008
Parker Shipton, The Nature of Entrustment, Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press)
2007
Barbara Cooper, Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel (Indiana University Press)
2006
Matory Lorand, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton University Press)
2005
Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa (University of Chicago Press)
2005
Jan Vansina, How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600, (University of Virginia Press)
2004
Allen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts, A SAINT in the CITY: Sufi Art in Urban Senegal (University of California Los Angeles)
2003
Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge University Press)
2002
Judith Carney, Black Rice (Harvard University Press)
2002
Diana Wylie, Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa (University Press of Virginia)
2001
Karin Barber, Generation of Plays (Indiana University Press)
2001
John Peel, Religious Encounter & the Making of Yoruba (Indiana University Press)
2000
Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Duke University Press)
1999
Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (Kumarian Press)
1998
Susan Mullin Vogel, Baule: African Art Western Eyes (Yale University Press)
1997
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton University Press)
1996
Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Heinemann)
1995
Henrietta L. Moore and Megan Vaughn, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990 (Heinemann, James Curry, University of Zambia)
1994
Keletso E. Atkins, The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843-1900 (Heinemann)
1993
Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford University Press)
1992
Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Senegalais in French West Afrca, 1857-1960 (Heinemann Educational Books)
1991
Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (University of Wisconsin Press)
1991
Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (University of Chicago Press)
1990
Edwin Wilmsen, Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari (University of Chicago Press)
1989
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730 -1830 (University of Wisconsin Press)
1989
V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Indiana University Press)
1988
John Iliffe, The African Poor: A History (Cambridge University Press)
1987
Paul M. Lubeck, Islam and Urban Labor in Northern Nigeria: The Making of a Muslim Working Class (Cambridge University Press)
1987
T.O. Beidelman, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (Indiana University Press)
1986
Sara Berry, Fathers Work for Their Sons: Accumulation, Mobility, and Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community (University of California Press)
1985
Claire Robertson, Sharing the Same Bowl (Indiana University Press)
1984
Paulin Hontoundji, African Philosophy (Indiana University Press)
1983
James W. Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (Princeton University Press)
1982
Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925 (Yale University Press)
1982
Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (Harvard University Press)
1981
Gavin Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoisie, 1905-1970 (Yale University Press)
1981
Gwyn Prins, The Hidden Hippopotamus: Reappraisal in African History: The Early Colonial Experience in Western Zambia (Cambridge University Press)
1980
Richard B. Lee, The !Kung San (Cambridge University Press)
1980
Margaret Strobel, Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890-1975 (Yale University Press)
1979
Hoyt Alverson, Mind in the Heart of Darkness: Value and Self-Identity Among the Tswana of Southern Africa (Yale University Press)
1978
William Y. Adams, Nubia: Corridor to Africa (Princeton University Press)
1977
M. Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (University of Wisconsin Press)
1976
Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press)
1975
Lansine Kaba, Wahhabiyya: Islamic Reform and Politics in French West Africa (Northwestern University Press)
1975
Elliott Skinner, African Urban Life (Princeton University Press)
1974
John N. Paden, Religion and Political Culture in Kano (University of California Press)
1973
Allen F. Isaacman, Mozambique The Africanization of a European Institution: The Zambezi Prazos, 1750-1902 (University of Wisconsin Press)
1972
Francis Deng, Tradition and Modernization (Yale University Press)
1971
René Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (Praeger Publishers)
1970
Stanlake Samkange, Origins of Rhodesia (Praeger Publishers)
1969
Paul and Laura Bohannan, Tiv Economy (Northwestern University Press)
1968
Herbert Weiss, Political Protest in the Congo (Princeton University Press)
1967
Jan Vansina, Kingdoms of the Savanna (University of Wisconsin Press)
1966
Leo Kuper, An African Bourgeoisie (Yale University Press)
1965
Ruth Schachter Morganthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa (Oxford University Press)