W&L’s Dennie Honored For Book

W&L’s Dennie Honored For Book

Nneka Dennie, assistant professor of history at Washington and Lee University, has received the 14th Modern Language Association of America (MLA) Prize for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship.

Dennie’s award is one of 23 total prizes that were presented at the 2025 MLA Annual Convention on Jan. 10 in New Orleans. She was cited for her book “Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Radical Feminist,” published by the Oxford University Press in October 2023.

The MLA selection committee’s citation on Dennie’s publication notes that she “moves Shadd Cary’s important writings in several genres – embedded in various archival sources – into a broadly accessible published form. In doing so, Dennie combats the challenges of what Ashley D. Farmer calls a ‘disorderly distributed archive,’ the seemingly disorganized dispersal of materials produced by Black women. Dennie further argues that Shadd Cary needs to be viewed within a tradition of Black radicalism that is not monolithic but instead changes over the last two centuries while maintaining a through line of a Black radical ethic of care.”

“I’m honored that my book has received this award, but, more importantly, I’m thrilled for Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s work to be recognized in this way,” said Dennie.

“Shadd Cary was an abolitionist, suffragist and the first Black woman newspaper editor in North America,” she continued. “Despite her significance to the 19th-century Black freedom networks, she is not as well-known as some of her contemporaries. As the first collection of writings by and about Shadd Cary, I hope that my book can spur further research into her perspectives and activism, and that this award reflects growing interest in studying earlier generations of Black intellectuals.”

A member of the W&L faculty since 2020, Dennie specializes in 19th- and 20thcentury African American history, and her research examines Black intellectual history, Black feminist thought, transitional feminism and Black radicalism.

She holds a bachelor of arts in political science with honors in Africana studies from Williams College. She also earned a master of arts and doctorate in African American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also received a graduate certificate in advanced feminist studies.