5 July 2013

Eighth award nomination for first book

The debut book written by a historian from the University of Dundee has enjoyed a remarkable run of success after being nominated for no less than eight book awards.

Dr Zoe Colley, a lecturer on American History, had her first book, Ain't Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement, published in 2012 to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

Imprisonment became a badge of honour for many protestors during the civil rights movement as activists sought to transform arrest and imprisonment from something to be feared to a platform for the cause.

Although historians have recorded the phenomenon as part of wider studies of the period, Dr Colley is the first to follow activists inside the southern jails and prisons to explore their treatment and the different responses to mass arrest and imprisonment.

Nominations have been received for awards from groups such as the Organization of American History and the American Historical Association as well as for the prestigious Lillian Smith Book Award by the Southern Regional Council.

This award commemorates Smith's work against racial discrimination in the South during the 1950s and 1960s and is awarded to books of "outstanding creative achievements, worthy of recognition because of their literary merit, moral vision, and honest representation of the South, its people, problems, and promises."

Dr Colley said she was delighted with the book's positive response and hoped it would help further her research into post-1945 US history.

'It is quite unusual to be nominated for so many awards for a first book so I am absolutely thrilled,' she said. 'The book grew from the research I did for my doctoral thesis so I worked on it for several years. I have visited the Southern states and spoken to several activists who were part of the movement and who encountered oppressive and brutal treatment in jail.

'They continue to suffer to this day, not just physically and mentally as a result of the treatment they received, but because the criminal records they acquired has held them back in obtaining jobs and mortgages.

'One of the most interesting things I came across was the letters written by the activists from jail. Because they were prohibited from communicating with the outside world these needed to be written on toilet paper and smuggled out and they provide a wonderful insight into their experiences.'

Dr Colley focuses on the shift in philosophical and strategic responses of civil rights protestors from seeing jail as something to be avoided to seeing it as a way to further the cause. Imprisonment became a way to expose the evils of segregation, and highlighted to the rest of American society the injustice of southern racism.

By drawing together the narratives of many individuals and organisations, she paints a clearer picture of how the incarceration of civil rights activists helped shape the course of the movement. She places imprisonment at the forefront of civil rights history and shows how these new attitudes toward arrest continue to impact contemporary society and shape strategies for civil disobedience.

The first of the awards will be announced in August and will continue to be presented over the following year.

The full list of awards Dr Colley has been nominated for reads as:

• Southern Historical Association (SHA) Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsely Award for a distinguished book in southern history published in 2012.
• Society of American Historians (SAH) Francis Parkman Prize for work 'distinguished by its literary merit and makes an important contribution to the history of the United States' published in 2012
• British Association for American Studies (BAAS) best book published in American Studies in 2012
• Organization of American Historians (OAH) Frederick Jackson Turner Award for an author's first book in American History published in 2012.
• Organization of American Historians (OAH) Liberty Legacy Award for the best book on the history of the civil rights movement published in 2012
• Southern Association for Women Historians (SAHW) Willie Lee Rose Prize for the best book on southern history written by a woman published in 2012
• American Historical Association (AHA) John H. Dunning Prize for 'outstanding historical writing in United States History' published in 2011/12, a prize which has been awarded since 1927
• The Lillian Smith Book Award by the Southern Regional Council for books of "outstanding creative achievements, worthy of recognition because of their literary merit, moral vision, and honest representation of the South, its people, problems, and promises."

Ain't Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement, is published by Florida University Press and can be purchased at http://upf.com/book.asp?id=COLLEF07.

For media enquiries contact:
Grant Hill
Press Officer
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384768
E-MAIL: g.hill@dundee.ac.uk
MOBILE: 07854 953277