Marjoleine Kars, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will share the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. The prize is awarded each year to the “best book(s) written in English about slavery, abolition and their legacies across all borders and all time.”
Dr. Kars was honored for her book Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New Press, 2020). The book is about the Berbice slave rebellion in Guyana that began in 1763 and lasted more than a year. Her research focused on personal accounts of the rebellion that were discovered in the national archives of the Netherlands.
Dr. Kars is an affiliate faculty member in the Gender and Women’s Studies program at the Univerity of Maryland, Baltimore County. She joined the faculty at the university in 1994 and served as chair of the history department at the university from 2011 to 2018. She is a senior editor for the journal International Labor and Working Class History. Dr. Kars holds a Ph.D. in early American history from Duke University.
Dr. Kars will be honored at a ceremony sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York City on February 17, 2022.