FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 31, 2026
Contact: Alix Saba, Executive Director, asaed@africanstudies.org
Download a PDF to distribute here.
African Studies Review 2026 Awardees
PISCATAWAY, New Jersey, – The African Studies Association’s flagship journal Africa Studies Review is honored to announce its annual awards celebrating excellence in the field. The ASR will present the honors and winners during the 69th ASA Annual Meeting in New Orleans on Friday, December 4, 12:00pm at the New Orleans Marriott.
The ASR Best Anthology or Edited Collection Prize, sponsored by Cambridge University Press, recognizes editors and contributors to an anthology of original scholarship, cohesive in structure and interdisciplinary in nature, that advances African studies in new theoretical and/or methodological directions. The award recognizes the editor(s) and also the contributors as a whole. In making its selection the prize committee will pay particular attention to significance, originality, and quality of writing, and its contribution to advancing debates in African studies.
The winner of this year’s award is Martin A. Klein and Stephen Rockel, Enslaved Africans and Their Descendants in Africa: Life Histories (Ohio University Press, 2025).
The committee also selected one title for honorable mention:
Joanna Davidson & Benjamin N. Lawrance, Pathos and Power: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Widowhood in Africa, Past and Present, (Ohio University Press, 2025).
The ASR Best Africa-based Doctoral Dissertation Award recognizes an Africa-based doctoral student who has successfully defended their dissertation/doctoral thesis on any aspect of African studies at an African institution of higher education during the previous calendar year.
The winner of this year’s award is “Storytelling Among the Bakiga of Uganda: Changing Form, Applications and Performance Contexts, 1930-2009,” by Lillian Mbabazi (Applied Theatre, Makerere University).
The committee also selected one dissertation for honorable mention:
“Fugitive Subjects, Fractured Lives: Queer and Trans Displacements in Kenya and South Africa,” by John Marnell (Migration & Displacement, University of the Witwatersrand).
The ASR Best Article Prize recognizes the best research article published in African Studies Review during the previous volume year.
The winner of this year’s award is Doyle D. Calhoun, “’A Kind of Literary Archaeology’: Excavating Morocco’s Slave Past under the Protectorate (1912 – 1956)” ASR 68.1 (March 2025): 91-110. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2024.239
The committee also selected one article for honorable mention:
Johanna von Pezold, “Counterfeits as Social Goods: The Ethics of Chinese Fashion in Mozambique” ASR 69.2 (June 2026): 345-365. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2025.10142
