Syracuse University Historian Tess Murphy Wins Two Book Awards for The Creole Archipelago

Tessa Murphy, associate professor of history in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York, has received two new prizes for her first book, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

The Association of Caribbean Historians awarded the book its Elsa Goveia Book Prize, and the French Colonial Historical Society honored it with its Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize. The Elsa Goveia award recognizes excellence in the field of Caribbean history and is awarded to one author every two years. The Boucher prize is awarded annually and recognizes the best book on the French colonial experience from the 16th century to 1815.

In The Creole Archipelago, Dr. Murphy examines British and French attempts to assimilate or remake colonial societies that evolved beyond the boundaries of the European empire in the early modern Americas and how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean.

The book previously won the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association and the 2022 Book Prize from the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions.

Dr. Murphy is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where she majored in history. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago.