FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has awarded a Lapidus Center fellowship to Caree Banton, an assistant professor of history and African and African American studies at the University of Arkansas.

The highly competitive $30,000 fellowship will provide a six-month residency for Banton to work in the archives of the New York Public Library system. She will use the fellowship to write and research her forthcoming book, More Auspicious Shores: Post-Emancipation Barbadian Emigrants in Pursuit of Freedom, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Liberia, 1834-1912.

“I am delighted to be chosen to be the scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center and I am looking forward to the opportunity to meet and work with the other scholars and residents of the center,” Banton said.

Her book describes a group of 50 Barbadian families (346 individuals) and their efforts to emigrate to Liberia and to build a black nation that would be the envy of the world. Banton’s work brings together disparate fields of research in Caribbean post-emancipation, African civilization, and Liberian colonization to answer larger questions about blacks’ experiences of freedom, citizenship and nationhood within the internal logic of a black nation-building project. The book also explores the remaking of the black identity from a transatlantic perspective.

Banton’s research challenges scholars to rethink such categories as the “black Atlantic” – a term that has homogenized the experiences of diverse actors.

Banton joined the faculty in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences in 2013. She holds a doctorate in history from Vanderbilt University.