We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2022 Dorothy Ross Prize for the best article in U.S. intellectual history. This award goes to an emerging scholar, defined as a current graduate student or a scholar within five years of receiving the PhD. The article must have appeared in an academic journal in the 2021 calendar year and may be submitted by the author, editor, or others. The winner receives $500.
This year’s award goes to Joel Iliff (Regent University), for “‘Sustaining the Truth of the Bible’: Black Evangelical Abolitionism and the Transatlantic Politics of Orthodoxy,” Journal of the Civil War Era 11, no. 2 (June 2021): 164-193. We thank the prize committee of Chris Suh (Chair), Asheesh Kapur Siddique, and Robin Marie Averbeck. Here is the committee’s statement on Joel Iliff’s prize-winning scholarship:
“Using James Pennington as his guide, Joel Iliff uncovers a theologically conservative strain of antislavery thought among Black evangelicals. In contrast to radical abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Black evangelicals did not demand a blanket condemnation of slavery from the evangelical community. Instead, they argued that slavery threatened to turn people of African descent into “infidels.” Based on extensive archival research, Iliff convincingly shows how Pennington and other likeminded Black evangelicals engaged with German conservative theology, and how they drew from Awakened Germans’ interpretation of the New Testament to argue for abolition.
The essay makes an important historical intervention not only by tracing the transatlantic network of Black abolitionists created and sustained by their association with German Awakened theology but also by arguing that the lack of transatlantic evangelical unity (which has been interpreted by previous scholars as a “failure” caused by British and American disagreement over the possibility of admitting American slaveholders to the Evangelical Alliance meeting in 1846) should be regarded as the crowning achievement of the theologically conservative Black evangelicals who prevented the broader evangelical movement from condoning slavery. In this sense, Iliff’s article is an excellent example of how intellectual history and intellectual historians can shape the historiography / scholarship of ‘America in the world.’”
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Congratulations Joel Iliff! Note: A second award this year by the Society to an antebellum-oriented topic covering race, religion, and politics. I detect the beginnings of a theme. 🙂
Given my long interest in the contours of evangelical conservatism (as an object of reflection and criticism), I am pleased by the focus in your prize-winning paper. I’m also happy to read works, or read about them, that show the diversity within movements and work against the homogenization of lived racial/ethnic experience. – TL