2024 Carwardine Prize Announced
The 2024 Richard J. Carwardine Prize for the outstanding student on the U.S. History M.St. course has been awarded to Shereece Linton-Ramsay. She explains her research below.
My MSt thesis examined black girls’ experiences at a reformatory in New York between c.1915-1930. It placed the girls’ experiences in the context of the outlook and actions of the institution. It argued that black girls were subjected to deeply oppressive, racially discriminatory administrative procedures and disciplinary methods which portrayed them as aggressors and instigators, but that they strongly resisted intrusions on their personal liberties, whilst maintaining close-knit kinship bonds and strong conceptions of self.
This thesis was set amidst the era of the so-called ‘girl problem’ of the early 20th-century, wherein American social reformers espoused fears over female sexuality, and this ultimately contributed to the criminalisation of swathes of black girls. Progressive-era social reformers, alarmed by what they perceived as significant female sexual degeneracy in the years following the Victorian period, descended into a moral panic and attempted to confront the ‘girl problem’ through what they posited as rehabilitative intervention. As a consequence, girls – especially those who were black – became increasingly vulnerable to being arrested and convicted for prostitution, and vagrancy more generally. Thus, black girls in this New York reformatory found themselves on the periphery of this supposedly interventional project taking place within the confines of the institution, as their potential for rehabilitation and redemption was consistently denied by reformatory staff and social workers. These girls consequently fiercely challenged the administrative oppression they were subjected to, and their resistance was palpable on both an individual and collective level.
Daniel Rowe, the RAI’s Director of Academic Programmes and Convenor of the US History MSt and MPhil programmes in 2023-2024, said “Shereece performed excellently across the entire academic year. Her capstone thesis powerfully recovered the experiences of African American girls in a Progressive era reformatory. Not only did she produce sophisticated and deft written work, but she brought energy, enthusiasm, and enterprise to her studies—making the most of the soft academic learning opportunities that come from attending and participating in academic seminars and events. Wonderfully for us, she has returned this year as a DPhil student supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Clarendon Fund. We are very fortunate to have Shereece as one of our Postgraduate Members and part of the RAI community more broadly.”
The Carwardine Prize was established by a donation from the William S. Broadbent Family, and the RAI is very grateful for this generous support. It is named in honour of Professor Richard J. Carwardine, FBA, Rhodes Professor Emeritus of American History at Oxford and Distinguished Fellow of the RAI.
