Pickens Prize
The Department of African American Studies awards the William Pickens Prize annually for outstanding senior essays in the field of African and African American Studies.
- To read a tribute to the life and activism of William Pickens, Sr click here
- To read more about Yale Phi Beta Kappa graduate, William Pickens (‘04), a leading civil rights activist of the early 20th century click here
2023 Pickens Prize Recipient
Aaron Magloire, a graduating senior double majoring in African American Studies and English, was awarded the 2023 Willam Pickens Prize for his essay “It Was Lovely Up in the Bottom”: A Dramatic Exploration of Three Minor Characters in Toni Morrison’s Sula.
Annual Pickens Prize Award Winners
2023
- Aaron Magloire “It was Lovely Up in the Bottom”: A Dramatic Exploration of Three Minor Characters in Toni Morrison’s Sula
2022
- Nicole Jefferson Race, Space, and Place: Infrastructural Vulnerability and Cultural Community Organizing in Broadmoor, New Orleans after Katrina”
2021
- Anna Milliken “Piercing a Black Feminist Framework: Quilting in Gee’s Bend, Alabama”
- Zyria Rodgers “Jazz”
2020
- Jordan Bruner “The Ostracizing of Young Black Athletes”
- Imani Butler “Black Dreams Matter: An Experiment in Educational Possibilities”
- Solomon Ghebreyesus “The Whole Haitian Questions: Paradoxes of African American Responses to the United States Occupation of Haiti, 1910-1934”
- Lydia Horan “All I want to do is just survive: Analyzing Predatory Lending in Boston as a Manifestation of Neoliberal Racial Capitalism”
- John McKissick “Don’t Give Away Anything That You Can’t Get Back: Private Archives and the People That Create Them”
- Tyler Miles “We will be unstopable: Black Queer Care in the City of Brotherly Love”
- Devin Moore “Land Acquisition Displacement and Emergecy: A History of Injustice in Michigan”
- Kai Nugent “Talking Black on the Big State: The Rhetorical Use of African American English by Black Speakers in America”
- Branson Rideaux “Young, Colored Me, A Black Studies Thesis on Archival Recovery Through Embodied Performance”
- Ry Walker “Undisciplined, How Broken Windows Policing was Insinuated into New York City Public Schools”
2019
- Eleanor Pritchett “’Transcendentally Material’: Aaron Douglas and the Visuals of Publishing in the Harlem Renaissance”
2018
- Youn Chang “Seat of Empire: Multiracial Student Organizing at Yale Against War & Militarism”
2017
- Lauren Chambers “A Different Kind of Dark Energy: Placing Race and Gender in Physics”
2015
- Jordan Konell “A Special Solidarity?: Philadelphia’s Black-Jewish Relationship and the 1964 Columbia Avenue Riot”
2014
- David Joseph-Gotenier “From Segregation to Re-Segregation: A History of Racial Inequality in the YMCA”
2013
- Ethan Mordecai Cargill “The Black Arts Iconography of John Coltrane”
- Emily Wanger “An ‘Awkward Silence’ - Examining Civil Rights Organizations’ Belated Opposition to Mass Incarceration in the United States”
2012
- Jordan Rogers “Put your House in Order and Plot a Sweet Life: Home, Movement, Sexuality, and the Black Diasporic Musical Tradition in the South of France”
- Christopher Pagliarella “The African Methodist Episcopal and Black Baptist Churches in Literacy Education: Achievement, Loss and Hope”
2011
- Rhiana Gunn-Wright “Breaking the Brood Mare: Representation, Welfare Policy and Teen Pregnancy in New Haven”
2010
- Naomi Bland “Plan B: The Collision of the Birth Control Movement and the Uplift Movement Viewed Through Works of Angelina Weld Grimké”
- Rodney Reynolds “I Know of No Better Way to Express the Struggle of Our People: King, Hughes, and the Poetics of the Civil Rights Movement”
2009
- Rena Karefa-Johnson “The Stolen Girls Locked in the Leesburg Stockade: The Forgotten Price of Freedom”
2008
- Andrew Dowe “Time/Space/Self - Movement and Identity in black queer literary imaginations
- Maura Fitzgerald Second Line Parades in New Orleans: Revelry and Resistance in the ‘Spaces Between’ ”
2007
- Offiong Bassey “Unlikely Candidates: The Authenticating Power of Evangelical Conversion and Call in the Live of Nineteenth-century Itinerant Ministers, Sojourner Truth and arena Lee”
- Hallfridur Birnir “Walking Towards Brilliance: The Public Sculptures of David Hammons”
- Cynthia So “The Causes and Consequences of Undocumented Haitian Immigration to the Dominican Republic”
2006
- Kersten Charity Stevens “The Blues-Hip Hop Dichotomy: Assessing Interstitiality in the Black Noise of the Past and Present”
- Bryant Hall “The Power of Hypocrisy: The Politics of Double Morality in Cuba”
2005
- Lia Bascomb “Three Voices of Black Iconography: Nina Simone, Bob Marley, and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti”
2004
- Julianna Bentes “From Strong Roots: The Impact of World War II on the Civil Rights Movement through Citizenship, Empowerment, and Mobilization”
- Erin Liotta “Bill T. Jones and Uncle Tom: Understanding Modern America Through the Politics of Dance”
2003
- Nilofar Gardezi “Kaleidoscopic in Memory Now”: Symbolism and Historicity in Robert Hayden’s ‘Angle of Ascent’ ”
- Cameron Leader-Picone “Colored People’s Laughter: African American Literature, Jazz, Blues and the Problem of the Color Line”
- Sarah Nelson Wright “Adopting Differences: Hybridity, Intersectionality and Transracial Adoption In Contemporary America”
2002
- Joshua Jelly-Schapiro “Are We All Creoles Now?”: Ethnicity and (Imagi-)Nation in a Heterogenous Caribbean Diaspora
- Melissa Barton “ ‘An Off-Rhyme Occasion’: Race, Politics, and the Artistry of Gwendolyn Brooks’s War Sonnets”
- Alan Schoenfield “The Politics of Position in the Teaching of Black Literature and the Future of Multicultural Education”
2001
- Eyi Tuakli-Wosornu “Black Skin/White Class: An Exploration of Black Students in New England Preparatory Schools”
- Alexandra L. Cox “Reproduction, Apprehension, Production: The Visual Politics of the Crack Baby Scare”
2000
- Ayanna M. Johnson “Why Black Women Withdraw Early from Selective Colleges and Universities”
- Brian J. Kreiter “Blackaccess.Com: Reevaluating African-American Participation in the Internet Economy”
1999
- Rosa Walker “Blackaccess.Com: Reevaluating African-American Participation in the Internet Economy”
1998
- Regina Bain “Black Theater: The Altar Line: An Ideology of Theater Art for the Black Community”
- Lorelei Williams “Wallflowers: Black Women in the Television Landscape”
1997
- Nicholas Taylor Boggs “Of Mimicry and (Little Man Little) Man: Towards a queersighted theory of black childhood”