Yale Announces 2026 Frederick Douglass Book Prize Finalists
New Haven, Conn.— Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance,
and Abolition (Gilder Lehrman Center or GLC) today has announced the finalists for the twenty-eighth annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for global studies of slavery, opposition to it, and the experiences and resistance of enslaved people. Jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University’s MacMillan Center, this annual prize of $25,000 recognizes the best book written in English on the topics of slavery, resistance, or abolition copyrighted in the preceding year.
The three finalists for the 2026 prize are: Kim F. Hall for “The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery, and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean” (University of Pennsylvania Press); Casey Schmitt for “The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean” (University of Pennsylvania Press); and Daniel Lord Smail for “Magdalena Coline: A Life Beyond Slavery in Mediterranean Europe” (Princeton University Press).
The winner will be announced following the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Review Committee meeting in the fall, and the award will be presented at a celebration at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City in February 2027.
From a total of 95 submissions, the finalists were selected by a jury of scholars that included Diana Paton (chair), William Robertson Professor of History, University of Edinburgh; W. Caleb McDaniel, Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities and Professor of History, Rice University; and Tiya Miles, Michael Garvey Professor of History and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
“We read many powerful and deeply researched works,” jury chair Diana Paton observed. “The shortlist can only acknowledge a small fraction of the excellent research published on slavery, emancipation and resistance in 2025.”
The jury’s descriptions of the three finalists follow.
Kim F. Hall’s “The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery, and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean” uses interdisciplinary analysis grounded in Black feminism, literary studies, and premodern Critical
Race Studies to reveal the connections between the most ordinary aspects of life in England and the development of plantation slavery in the Caribbean. In dialogue with Sidney Mintz and Kara Walker, among many others, Hall analyses the place of sugar and sweetness in English and Caribbean society in the seventeenth century, showing that as plantation slavery expanded and sugar became more accessible to a wider range of people, it also became deeply ingrained in English literary culture. She reads sources such as cookbooks that have not previously been connected to the history of slavery, while re-reading more familiar sources such as Richard Ligon’s “True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados” in fresh ways that draw attention to aspects of these texts that have been overlooked. Expertly blending memoir, close readings, archival research, and transtemporal reflections on the meanings of race and consumption, Hall’s experimental, creative offering transports readers from cane fields to kitchens to modern art installations, showing what a cultural fascination with sugar both reveals and hides.
Casey Schmitt’s “The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean” examines the entangled history of the Caribbean in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing the importance of multiple agents: Kalinago and Maroons as well as
English, French, and Spanish colonizers. Her book invites readers to investigate this period for its own sake rather than as a precursor to the eighteenth-century world of the imperial plantation that was to come. Schmitt shows that the Caribbean in this period was dominated by captive-taking and trafficking in people from multiple directions. Kalinago people, for example, played a critical role as intermediaries and brokers between European empires. The book makes extraordinary use of archival sources, from British, French, and especially Spanish archives, to trace human stories across the linked spaces of the Caribbean. The result is a work that complicates scholarship on the origins of New World slavery, identifies new centers of slaving, and demonstrates that the archive is not always silent. In testimonies in Spanish records, she finds, those who were most vulnerable to predation by traffickers told their stories and asserted their freedom.
Daniel Lord Smail’s “Magdalena Coline: A Life Beyond Slavery in Mediterranean Europe” is a microhistorical tour de force based on the life and struggles of Magdalena Coline, who was captured near
Naples in 1347 and trafficked into slavery in Marseille. She achieved freedom through marriage, became a successful moneylender, and successfully fought two lawsuits against her former enslaver. In Smail’s hands this is a gripping story, but it is much more than that. In learning about Magdalena, readers also come to understand many aspects of the history of the late medieval Mediterranean world. In a richly contextualized narrative based on painstaking archival research, Smail shows myriad aspects of the importance of slavery, including how it worked in terms of expectations about social integration and dependence, the ongoing relationships of the formerly enslaved to those who had owned them, the complex intertwining of marital status and slavery, and the significance of credit and moneylending.
The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), an enslaved person who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and orators of the nineteenth century.
The mission of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition is to support academic excellence in the study of slavery and its enduring legacies, make this knowledge freely available to the public, and foster work toward social justice. The GLC was launched in 1998 through contributions from philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman and is affiliated with the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. Through contributions from a circle of individual donors, the GLC supports research fellowships, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, scholarly working groups, publications, free public programs, and educational workshops for secondary school teachers and students, domestic and international. For further information and to find out how you can support the continuing work of the GLC, visit https://macmillan.yale.edu/glc, e-mail: gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu or call (203) 432-3339.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History was founded in 1994 by Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman, visionaries and lifelong supporters of American history education. The Institute is the leading nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of American history through educational programs and resources. The Institute serves K–12 teachers and students, honors scholars, and informs the general public. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is supported through the generosity of individuals, corporations, and foundations. The Institute’s programs have been recognized by awards from the White House, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Organization of American Historians, the Council of Independent Colleges, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. For further information, visit gilderlehrman.org or call (646) 366-9666.
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