The McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Penn Press are pleased to announce that BJ Lillis has been awarded the inaugural MCEAS Dissertation Prize. BJ’s dissertation “A Valley Between Worlds: Slavery, Dispossession, and the Creation of a Settler-Colonial Society in the Hudson Valley, 1674-1766,” was accepted by Princeton University’s Department of History in 2024.
“A Valley Between Worlds” explores the creation of a distinctive settler colonial society in the Hudson Valley through the lens of the colonial manor. The manor was a form of property that granted rights in land and limited legal jurisdiction to a lord. In practice, manorial land ownership was not absolute; rights in land were shared between landlords, tenant farmers, and Indigenous communities. Slavery was central to the establishment and growth of the Hudson Valley’s manors, and enslaved people probably made up between ten and thirty percent of manor populations. Manorial property relations shaped a hierarchical and unequal rural society. Though unique, the Hudson Valley’s manors represented a powerful vision of colonial development, defined by large estates and landlord-tenant relationships, that resonated across the Atlantic world.
The MCEAS Dissertation Prize is awarded to an exceptional dissertation, completed within the last two years, concerning the histories and cultures of North America in the Atlantic World from 1492 to 1850. Winners of the MCEAS Dissertation Prize receive $1500 in research funds, a manuscript workshop, and a contract to publish a monograph derived from the dissertation in the Center’s Early American Studies series published with Penn Press.
The Center and Press would also like to congratulate the following finalists:
Scott Doebler, “Arboreal Apogees: Maya, Spanish, and English Ecologies in Lowland Yucatán and Guatemala, 1517-1717” (Pennsylvania State University).
Michael Haggerty, “Bars to Freedom: Incarceration, Emancipation, and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century New York” (University of California, Davis).
Tayzhaun Glover, “Freedom on the Horizon: Transmarine Marronage and the Abolition of Slavery in Dominica, Martinique, and St. Lucia, 1824-1848” (Duke University).
Russell Weber, “American Feeling: Political Passions and Affective Identity in the Revolutionary Era, 1754-1815” (University of California, Berkeley).