2026
Prizewinner:
- Charlotte Gleeson of King's College for a thoughtful and creative address to the enduring question of whether freedom is possible: Freedom from Liberation: Configurations of Marronage in Biografía de un cimarrón (1966) and Afuera crece un mundo (2017).
Highly Commended (in alphabetical order):
- S M Mashrur Arafin Ayon and Mallika Bandyopadhyah, both of Hughes Hall, for their robust and well-sourced confrontation of invisible forms of female enslavement entailed in domestic servitude: ‘If I try to escape’. Women, Slavery and the Gendered Body in Bengal, c. 1694-1843.
- Nimue McDowall of Newnham College, for a literary-philosophical analysis bringing home the efforts of Black banlieue residents in France to keep revolt all but invisible: Revolt, Futurity, and Flamboyance in Diaty Diallo’s Deux seconds d’air qui brûle [Two seconds of burning air].
- Dequn Teng of Girton College, for an engineering-based study of supply-chain audits: Hidden in the ledger: Modern Slavery, Supply-Chain Risk Models, and What a Diversity-Aware NLP System Can (and Cannot) See.
2025
Prizewinner:
- Carson Eckhard of St Edmund’s College for their essay, Beyond the Border of a Great Belonging: Biopower and Slavery’s Medical Afterlives Among Formerly Enslaved Women in Early National Philadelphia.
Highly Commended:
- Kim Abramson of Lucy Cavendish College, for linguistic awareness of how pidgin and creole languages continue to be marginalised: When a Name Betrays You.
- Peace Chisom Aniakor of Fitzwilliam College, who wrote on screen presentations of enslavement, domestic servitude and modern trafficking: I Am Not A Colour! White Supremacy, Blackness and African Resistance on Screen.
- Alexandra Bird of Corpus Christi College, for a critical account of a musical tradition whose dimensions have been underestimated: "Roll, Jordan, Roll": Flow, Spatiality and the Political Body in the Nineteenth Century African American Spiritual.
- Sydnae Taylor of Darwin College, whose study concerns the reality of ongoing enslavement legacies in contemporary obstetric care: Breeding Narratives: The Continuity of Colonial Violence in Black Jamaican Women.
- Emilia Warr of Selwyn College, who analysed the embodiment of enslavement and its partial resolution in Morrison’s famous novel: Embodiment, Trauma, and Healing: A Study of Hands and Feet in ‘Beloved’.
If you would like to read any of these essays, please contact the Legacies of Enslavement Research Hub Repository via LErepository@girton.cam.ac.uk but note that the Repository Archivist is part-time only.