Congratulations to Beverly Val-Addo on receiving the 2024-2025 Francis S. Benjamin Prize for her paper, “Fashioning Culture: African and Diasporic Women in the Making of the Black Atlantic, 1850-1940.” Val-Addo’s paper explores transnationalism in the Black Atlantic from the age of abolition to the colonial period in Africa. Specifically, it aims to shed light on how the emancipation of enslaved individuals in the Americas impacted materiality in the Atlantic world. By examining the interactions between African and diasporic women, the paper argues that African-descended women’s dressmaking and textile consumption are central to understanding emancipation and identity formation in West Africa and Brazil.  

The Benjamin Prize was established in early 1974 in memory of Francis S. Benjamin, who taught at Emory from 1946 to 1973. This gift is used to reward the best paper written by a graduate student during their first two years in the Emory History PhD program.