Historian Barbara Savage Honored for Book on Merze Tate
Barbara Savage, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought and a professor emerita of Africana studies, has been recognized as a 2024 American Book Award winner by the Before Columbus Foundation and was a finalist for the prestigious Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award.
She received these honors for her latest work, Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale 2023). The book, based on more than a decade of research, is a biography of Merze Tate, a trailblazing Black scholar and international affairs expert born in 1905 in rural Michigan who traveled the world and challenged systemic injustices and cultural expectations.
The Before Columbus Foundation is a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature. The American Book Award program honors excellence in American literature “without restriction or bias with regard to race, sex, creed, cultural origin, size of press or ad budget, or even genre.” Award winners are nominated and selected by a panel of writers, editors, and publishers who represent the diversity of American literary culture.
The MAAH Stone Book Award is an annual prize that encourages scholarship and writing within the field of African American history, with prizes awarded for exceptional adult non-fiction books written in a literary style.
Savage, who has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in 20th-century African American history, American religious and social reform movements, and Black women’s political and intellectual history, was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford in 2018–19, where a new thesis prize in Black history was named in her honor.
She is the author of the award-winning books Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard 2009) and Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (UNC 1996), and has co-edited two essay collections, Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women and Women (UNC 2015) and Religion in the African Diaspora (Hopkins 2006).
