Mia Bay F’99 has been awarded the Bancroft Prize for her book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Considered one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history, the Bancroft Prizes have been awarded annually by Columbia University since 1948. This year’s second winner is Mae Ngai, for her book The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics.
Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) was described by the Bancroft Prize jury as “a major intervention in our understanding of the civil rights movement and the everyday life of racial domination,” which draws on “exhaustive and imaginative research in trade publications, litigation records, memoirs, oral histories and the press.”
Mia Bay is the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history, and holds a PhD and MPhil from Yale University. She was awarded an ACLS Fellowship in 1999 for her work on the cultural history of Afrocentrism.
“A major intervention in our understanding of the civil rights movement and the everyday life of racial domination,” which draws on “exhaustive and imaginative research in trade publications, litigation records, memoirs, oral histories and the press.”
