W. Anthony Sheppard, Marylin and Arthur Levitt Professor of Music at Williams College, won the American Musicological Society’s (AMS) 2020 Music in American Culture Award for his book Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2019). The Music in American Culture Award honors exceptional writing that both illuminates an important aspect of the music of the United States and places that music in a rich cultural context. Extreme Exoticism offers a detailed documentation and wide-ranging investigation of music’s role in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life.

Derrick R. Spires, Cornell University, won the Modern Language Association's (MLA) 2020 Prize for a First Book for The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).  Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition has named Sophie White as the 2020 winner of its 22nd annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize for Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press). White is Professor of American Studies, Concurrent Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies, and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The prize committee praised the book for bridging the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, thereby making a significant contribution to understanding both North American continental and transnational histories.

In addition to the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Voices of the Enslaved has won six additional book prizes (plus finalist for another 2).  They include