IRH boasts a list of fellows with remarkable professional accomplishments, the latest addition to which is Simon P. Newman, who was was awarded the 25th annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the 2024 American Council of Learned Societies Open Access Book Prize for Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (University of London Press, 2022). Simon conducted the research for Freedom Seekers while a Solmsen Fellow in 2019–2020, and completed the writing and and editing for the book over the following two years as an honorary fellow.
The Frederick Douglass Book Prize, jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, honors authors of outstanding non-fiction books in English published on the subject of slavery, resistance, and/or abolition. As one of two recipients of the prize in 2023, Simon received $25,000. Among the attendees of the ceremony at Trinity Church, New York City last February were history students and their teachers from high schools across the city. For Simon, “meeting these students and their teachers, and then engaging with them in a discussion of [his] research and [his] book, was exhilarating.” A full recording of the ceremony can be found here.
The ACLS Open Access Book Prize, which aspires to generate enthusiasm and prestige for open-access publishing among humanistic scholars, comes with a cash award of $20,000 sponsored by the Arcadia Fund. Freedom Seekers won the History Category and was deemed by one judge a “deeply researched, well argued, and effectively presented look into a hidden world within seventeenth-century, that of slaves in the imperial capital.” This award was particularly meaningful for Simon, who as Vice President of the Royal Historical Society developed New Historical Perspectives, an open-access monograph series for first-time authors. “The process of researching and developing that book series enhanced my understanding and appreciation of the reach of open-access publications,” said Simon. “I have undertaken research in West Africa and the Caribbean, and I have had first-hand experience of how many academics and students in those kinds of environments often have difficulty accessing publications that their libraries cannot afford. In fact, the same is increasingly true of many college and university libraries in North America and Europe.”
Open-access publishing is not the only resource Simon has used to make his scholarship accessible. In 2021, he partnered with Spread the Word and with ink sweat & tears to commission young Black and South Asian poets and artists in London. The result was Runaways London, which included an open-access book of their work and a short film. Working with non-academics was an invaluable experience for Simon. “I gained an appreciation for how creative artists could imagine histories I could only barely trace, and how their work could take my research to new audiences in new forms. They were able to reach broader publics who might never open an academic book.”
Formerly Sir Denis Brogan Professor of History in the School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, Simon is currently a Brown 2026 Senior Research Fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. This new fellowship is intended to foster critical inquiry into the founding of the American republic on its 250th anniversary, and to consider the future of democracy and the United States. While in residence, Simon is working on Freedom Seekers: Stories of Black Liberation in the American Revolutionary Era and Beyond, a major public humanities project in collaboration with UW–Madison, Montana State University, and Cal State Sacramento that tells the stories of individual freedom seekers from across the British Atlantic World, with particular focus on the period of the American Revolution.
Reflecting on his time at IRH, Simon had as much to say about the intellectual benefits: “Completing a book can be a somewhat lonely and even myopic endeavor, but the IRH allows for the perfect balance of focus on one’s own research and writing while thinking about the very different work of other scholars. I not only learned about new subjects, but was encouraged to develop critical insights that helped me shape my own ideas and thinking.” But he looks back just as fondly on the interpersonal benefits: “For me the Thursday Humani-tea [a weekly research break for all fellows], to say nothing of the ‘Beatles Monday’ monthly meetings [informal lunches in which a group of fellows listened to all the Beatles albums in order], are almost as important as the Monday seminars. They help nurture the collaborative community that is the essence of the IRH. The shared endeavors of a group of researchers, talking, listening, and encouraging one another fosters a community of learning.”