Paula J. Giddings
Best Article Award
About the Award
The Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award honors an author whose work embodies the groundbreaking nature and innovative spirit of Paula’s writing. We aim for this award to highlight different forms of knowledge production that engage scholarship, journalism, activism, and cultural work from Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism.
In keeping with Giddings’s wide ranging history of commitment to rigorous research, beautiful writing and paradigm shifting, the Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award will be bestowed each fall at the National Women’s Studies Association Meeting. Awardees will be informed in advance, and are expected to attend the NWSA meeting where they will present a summary of their essay and receive the award—a small monetary prize, a commemorative certificate, and a gift set of Giddings’s books.
2025 Award Winners
Best Article Recipient
Yurika Tamura – “Rehumanizing Ainu: Performance of Desubjectification and a Politics of Singularity” (Vol. 23, No. 1)
Yurika Tamura is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her scholarship focuses on Indigeneity, media and performance arts, minority formations under Japan’s imperialism, and corpo-materialist ethics of sound and sensation. Her forthcoming book, Vibration of Others: Resonation and Corporeal Ethics of Transnational Indigenous Soundscapes, studies how Ainu artists curate transnational Indigenous soundscapes to address racism and environmental crises in post-Fukushima Japan and beyond.
Honorable Mention
Umayyah Cable – “Coming Out for Community, Coming Out for the Cause: Queer Arab American Activism in the 1990s” (Vol. 23, No. 2)
Umayyah Cable (they/them) is an assistant professor in the departments of American Culture and Film, Television, and Media, and a core faculty member in the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Their first book, Mainstreaming Palestine: Cinematic Activism and Solidarity Politics in the United States, is set to be published in fall 2025 on University of Minnesota Press.
Honorable Mention
Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang – “De-naming: Unraveling the Sex-Skin and Gender-Mask Technologies in the Colonial Naming Structure” (Vol. 23, No. 2)
Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Her academic praxis stands at the intersection of decolonial feminism, third-world feminism, and the politics of women and queers of color, critical race and ethnic studies, and translation and communication studies in transpacific Asia and North America. Her current research explores the role of decolonial translators, who create communicative resistance and communal knowledge through the strategic utilization of their untranslatability. She is also the winner of the 2023 National Women’s Studies Association Women of Color Caucus—Frontiers Student Essay Award.
Internal Award Process
Submissions are selected by the Editorial Board from each published volume of Meridians. For more information about our Editorial Board, please click here.
About Paula J. Giddings
Paula J. Giddings is Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor of Africana Studies Emeritus, Smith College, Northampton, MA. She is the author of When and Where I Enter: The Impact on Black Women on Race and Sex in America (HarperCollins, 1984); In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement (HarperCollins, 1988); and, most recently, the biography of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. Ida: A Sword Among Lions (HarperCollins, 2008) won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.
Ida was deemed one of the best books of 2008 by the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, and earned the first inaugural John Hope Franklin Research Center Book Award presented by the Duke University Libraries. The book also won the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians and the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavas Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.
Giddings is a former book editor and journalist who has written extensively on international and national issues and has been published by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jeune Afrique (Paris), The Nation, and Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, among other publications. She is also the editor of Burning All Illusions, an anthology of articles on race published by The Nation magazine from 1867 to 2000.