Proud Shoes Book Fellowship
The Proud Shoes First Book Fellowship committee invites applications from scholars who are developing their first full academic book manuscript in history, social justice, politics, law, race, gender, and sexuality studies or related fields. The book manuscript can contribute to any discipline (humanities, social sciences, arts, politics, etc.), can be at any stage of development (proposal, first chapters, complete manuscript), but must be prepared for an academic press. Applicants can be at any stage in their career but must be working on a first book manuscript and have a definite timeline for completion.
The goal of this fellowship is to provide critical feedback to new authors toward completion of a full-length book of scholarly work. Awardees in 2024 will spend one day at a virtual workshop. Awardees in 2025 will attend the workshop in person. Awardees from the first year cannot apply for the Fellowship the second year.
Eight awards will be offered (award will include a $1,000 stipend, meal voucher, and writing library). Incomplete applications will not be reviewed and no late applications will be accepted.
This fellowship is a tribute to Pauli Murray’s groundbreaking autobiographical work, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (1956), and aims to honor Pauli’s enduring impact on history and social justice. This fellowship offers a unique opportunity for first-time authors to develop their book manuscripts while engaging in community-focused writing and research. We’re excited to offer a collaborative space where emerging scholars can refine their work, guided by the expertise of Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans, author of Black Feminist Writing: A Practical Guide to Publishing Academic Books (2024), and the support of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Justice.
Our 2024 Cohort
Jazma Sutton, Ph.D.
Dr. Sutton’s research focuses on the histories of slavery and freedom in the U.S. with a particular interest in African American women’s history and the Midwest. Her current book project, Moving toward Freedom: Black Women, Freedom, and Early Migration in Antebellum Indiana, chronicles the lives of Black women—free, enslaved, and self-liberated—who chose (or were forced) to leave the South and settle in Indiana, between 1787 and 1865.
Her recent publications include an article in the journal Genealogy titled, ““Go to the Attics, the Closets, and the Basements”: Black Women’s Intergenerational Practices of Memory Keeping in Oxford, Ohio.”
Eshe Sherley
Eshe Sherley is a historian of Black politics, gender, sexuality, and labor in the 20th century United States. She is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Wake Forest University. Dr. Sherley received a B.A. in African American Studies from Yale University and a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. Dr. Sherley is working on a monograph tentatively titled Fighting for Life: How Black Women Transformed the Politics of Labor and Reproduction in Atlanta, 1968-1985. Fighting for Life tells the story of how a network of Black women activists became key political players in Atlanta and challenged both white and Black political leadership in the city.
Briana Adline Royster
Briana Adline Royster is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. She received her PhD in History from New York University with concentrations in African Diaspora history and Latin American and Caribbean history. Her research interests center the histories of Black women primarily in the United States and the Caribbean during the first half of the twentieth century, with a focus on gender, empire, identity formation, Black internationalism, and religion. She is currently working on her book manuscript, Of Our Stock and Blood: Black Missionaries, the Guianas, and Global Racial Progress, 1898-1945.
Dr. Kimberly F. Monroe
Dr. Kimberly F. Monroe is a first-generation college graduate from South Louisiana. She is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and African American History at Trinity Washington University in Washington, DC. She is a scholar of African American Studies and the global African Diaspora. Her research interests include Africana Women Activism, Black Internationalism, Global Black Power, Pan-Africanism, Hip Hop and Africana Literature. She is currently developing her manuscript, The Black Underground: Assata Shakur and Global Freedom Struggles. She is an organizer with Pan-African Community Action (PACA) a grassroots group of African/Black people organizing for community-based power. Her hobbies include photography, visiting bookstores, museums, traveling and learning throughout the Black world.
Dr. Elise A. Mitchell
Dr. Elise A. Mitchell is a historian of the Black Atlantic with a focus on the Atlantic slave trade, Caribbean slavery, and healing. Her teaching and research interests include the history of the body, histories of gender and sexuality, the history of medicine and healing, and the longue durée history of Black life in and around the Atlantic basin. Her book project, Morbid Geographies: Enslavement, Epidemics, and Embodiment in the Early Modern Atlantic World is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Morbid Geographies considers how enslaved Africans contended with smallpox outbreaks in the context of the Atlantic slave trade to the Caribbean between roughly 1500 and 1800.
Tamanika Ferguson
Tamanika Ferguson is currently a visiting research scholar in Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She earned a doctorate degree at Howard University in the interdisciplinary field of Communication, Culture, and Media Studies and paired it with a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies. Dr. Ferguson approaches her work as a black feminist-womanist scholar working at the intersections of feminist and intersectional sociology and criminology, critical race theory, carceral violence, political resistance, social activism, and ethnographic methods and methodology. Her body of research draws on ethnographic methods to investigate the lived experiences of incarcerated women, particularly black and poor and marginalized women of color and their politics and practices of collective and confrontational resistance and actions to predatory state and institutional violence. One of two core articles (Lessons on Resistance, Activism and Solidarity: Incarcerated Women and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners) from her qualitative dissertation was currently published in Feminist Formations. Dr. Ferguson’s forthcoming book, Voices from the Inside: Incarcerated Women Speak, which conceptualizes and theorizes the incarcerated women’s public sphere and foregrounds the advocacy work of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCW), is slated for publication in January 2026 under the critical carceral studies titles at UC Press.
Dr. Jalondra A. Davis
Dr. Jalondra A. Davis is a Black feminist creative-intellectual currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at University of California, Riverside. She has published on speculative fiction and culture in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Studies, Shima Journal, the Museum of Science Fiction Journal of Science Fiction, and anthologies including the Routledge Anthology of Co-Futurisms, Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood, and the Politics of Ugliness. She has also written for publications such as STAT Los Angeles Review of Books, and ASAP-J. Her monograph in progress, Merfolk and Black Being in Water analyzes the historically-specific worldbuilding of Black literature, art, and performance featuring human-aquatic hybrids, with a focus on how such narratives interrogate Western modernity, humanism, and the Anthropocene. Known in the mermaiding community as Mami Melusine, she hosts the Merwomanist Podcast, a weekly show about Black mermaids, fantasy, aquatic culture, self-care, spirituality, and play.
Samah Choudhury
Samah Choudhury is a postdoctoral researcher and instructional faculty with the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Samah is at work on her first book, American Muslim and the Politics of Secularity, which asks how a “sense of humor” came to be a prized trait of the modern secular subject and why present-day Muslims are consistently configured as lacking this comportment. Through a study of the American Muslim standup comedians, she contends that Muslim legibility depends on situating Islam and within the logics of model secular subjecthood and the register of race. Her work has been supported by the Asian American Religions Research Initiative, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, the UNC Chapel Hill Asian American Center, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. She previously taught at Ithaca College and earned her PhD in Islamic Studies from UNC Chapel Hill in 2020.