Professors Stephanie Newell and Egor Lazarev Awarded 2024 MacMillan Center Book Prizes

Stephanie Newell, George M. Bodman Professor of English, and Egor Lazarev, Assistant Professor, Political Science, have been awarded the 2024 international book prizes by the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.

Stephanie Newell received the 2024 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for best book for Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s - 1960s (Boydell and Brewer). Her work focuses on the cultural histories of printing and reading in West Africa, with special attention to African-owned newspapers in the colonial period and local print cultures in the twentieth century. The prize committee described Newell’s book as “fascinating, deftly written, and deeply researched” as it examines “how the English language figure[d] in the public spheres of Britain’s West African colonies in the early twentieth century.”

Egor Lazarev received the 2024 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for best first book by a Yale ladder faculty member for State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press). His research focuses on law and state-building in the former Soviet Union. The prize committee noted that Lazarev’s work “reflects extraordinary scholarship as the author draws on many sources including surveys, interviews, court room documents and observations, and informal conversations with a diverse array of individuals.” They further commended the book’s “contemporary relevance in relation to gender issues, the impact of war on the state and society at large, and the integration of religion, tradition, government, and international law.”

Established in 2004 to recognize the distinguished legacy of two former directors of the MacMillan Center, the prizes are awarded for books on international topics written by current members of the Yale faculty. Award recipients receive a research appointment at the MacMillan Center and a $5,000 research award.

Citations for the winning books follow:

Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s - 1960s (Boydell and Brewer)

Groundbreaking examination of literary production in West African newspapers and local printing presses in the first half of the 20th century, which adds an African perspective to transatlantic Black studies, and shows how African newsprint creativity has shaped readers’ ways of imagining subjectivity and society under colonialism.

From their inception in the 1880s, African-owned newspapers in ‘British West Africa’ carried an abundance of creative writing by local authors, largely in English. Yet to date this rich and vast array of work has largely been ignored in critical discussion of African literature and cultural history. This book, for the first time, explores this under-studied archive of ephemeral writing—from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues and reviews, and letters—and argues for its inclusion in literary genres and anglophone world literatures. Combining in-depth case studies of creative writing in the Ghana and Nigeria press with a major reappraisal of the Nigerian pamphlets known as ‘Onitsha market literature,’ and focusing on non-elite authors, the author examines hitherto neglected genres, styles, languages, and, crucially, readerships. She shows how local print cultures permeated African literary production, charting changes in literary tastes and transformations to genres and styles, as they absorbed elements of globally circulating English texts into formats for local consumption. Offering fresh trajectories for thinking about local and transnational African literary networks while remaining attuned to local textual cultures in contexts of colonial power relations, anticolonial nationalism, the Cold War and global circuits of cultural exchange, this important book reveals new insights into ephemeral literature as significant sites of literary production, and contributes to filling a gap in scholarship on colonial West Africa.

State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press)

State-Building as Lawfare explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives? The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below.

Learn more about the MacMillan Center's International Book Prizes.