New York University’s Ada Ferrer to Be Awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize

Ada Ferrer, professor of history and professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University, has been selected to received the 2015 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The prize recognizes the best book of the year on slavery or abolition and written in the English language.

Professor Ferrer is being honored for her book Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014). The prize jury stated that “Ferrer’s research is most impressive.” They added that the book was composed in a “beautifully written and understandable way that will be readily followed by readers with minimal knowledge of 19th-century Cuba, Haiti, and the Spanish Caribbean.”

The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City. The $25,000 prize will be awarded in a ceremony at the Gilder Lehrman Institute on February 4.

Professor Ferrer has served on the New York University faculty since 1995. She is a graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Dr. Ferrer earned a master’s degree in history at the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. An earlier book was Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999).