IHPST PhD candidate, Myriam Iuorio and PhD Student Tola Ajao —aiming to achieve candidacy in 2026— have been awarded the competitive 2025 18th-Century Africa Publication Fellowship, jointly offered by the African Studies Association (ASA) and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). This fellowship supports early-career researchers whose work advances new perspectives on Africa and its diasporas in the long eighteenth century.
Over the coming year, fellows will receive extensive mentorship from senior scholars and workshop their manuscripts as they prepare them for submission to peer-reviewed journals by early 2026.
For Myriam Iuorio, the fellowship has created a welcoming environment where early-career researchers and experienced scholars work closely together. As she notes “learning about the other Fellows’ projects and methodologies in addressing issues such as recovering the voices of African people in archival records has given me new insights to critically engage with European sources.” These conversations, she explains, highlight the need to recentre African people as key historical actors rather than peripheral figures in European narratives: “This was especially helpful as I am dealing with the challenges of uncovering the experiences of West Central African people with disabilities, who have usually been marginalized in historical accounts.”
Mentorship has been a cornerstone of her experience. Her assigned mentor, she notes, “provided extremely helpful feedback during the early stages of the research paper,” guidance that helped her refine her methodological approach and position her work more clearly within current historiographical debates. Research and writing can often feel solitary, but the fellowship reframes the process as a collaborative one. Through workshops and discussions with journal editors, Myriam has gained a clearer view of the steps required to prepare a manuscript for publication. As she explains, “it was a great way to learn how to plan the different editorial steps and be aware of the time and logistics of publishing.” In addition to shaping the content of the paper, this feedback has helped her think about “prospective audiences and better position my work within the current historiography. As a young scholar in the latest stage of my PhD program, I am excited for these opportunities to reflect upon the possible directions of my future career and learn how to prepare my dissertation for a publication project.”
Myriam’s work reshapes existing narratives about the intersection of disability and race-making in European Renaissance thought. As she explains, “current historiography has highlighted the importance of observing and categorizing non-European bodies in early modern European processes of race-making. In particular, scholars have analysed the use of ‘monstrosity’ as a tool to categorize non-European people.” Expanding on these studies, she explores “the equally pervasive role that common early modern perceptions of impaired or otherwise ‘different’ bodies played in European descriptions of African people.” Myriam’s research shows why bringing scholarship on race-making into deeper conversation with critical disability studies is essential. Such an approach illuminates how premodern European ideas about impairment and bodily difference shaped standards of the “normal” European body, which were used in turn to measure the humanity and civilization of non-European peoples. Her work also resonates with contemporary conversations about inclusion. As Myriam reflects, “It is rare to find the same empowering perspectives towards people with disabilities in European sources, and I think this is also an important lesson for us today, as a reminder that social and cultural perceptions of the body play a fundamental role in building inclusiveness and equality for all.”
Tola Ajao approaches, from a novel perspective, the agricultural knowledge of Bilali Mohammed, an enslaved Senegambian manager on a Georgia plantation, through the published writings of planter Thomas Spalding. This kind of historical reconstruction requires reading between and beyond the lines of sources that were designed to portray the ingenuity of the planter class while supressing the role of African expertise: “I think what I am doing is more critical exploration than fabulation, but both may be at work!”
Tola was assigned Rebekah Mitsein (Boston College). An experienced scholar specialized in seventeenth and eighteenth-century British and transatlantic literature and culture, who is deeply committed to African History. Tola appreciated her “detailed, critical, and affirming comments,” but one piece of advice stood out: keeping a particular kind of reader in mind. “She was pragmatic about the reception of Africa-Diaspora history where some readers will want to discredit the work, no matter its merits. She encouraged me to keep that reader in mind but not to write for them, sort of defensively, but instead to write for the reader who wants to engage with the work in the spirit of constructive criticism.”
The fellowship’s publication workshops and editorial sessions have helped her shape a paper aimed at journals such as Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, History in Africa, and African Studies Review. The experience, she says, has been “great” because in the workshops she and the other fellows “got to hear from editors of the journals of both organizations in one space. They were very candid and open with us about what they look for and what they prefer not to see when it comes to submissions and revisions.” It has been an enriching experience as she prepares her manuscript for submission: “I will submit my paper, but I am in it for the process and honoured to be working alongside great scholars.”
The fellowship has also enabled her first archival research trip for this project. Because the ASA Annual Meeting will take place in Atlanta, Tola arranged an additional day to work with undigitized manuscripts at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Georgia State University, including an original 13-page document written by Mohammed in Arabic and Fulbe. “There has been a great deal of serendipity that the ASA conference for the fellowship happens to be in Atlanta, as the skilled manager of the Georgia Sea Island plantation at the centre of my work, Mohammed possessed agricultural and technical knowledge from West Africa, but he was also an early community leader of the Gullah Geechee – a unique African American Lower south (South Carolina and Georgia) culture to retain many traditions from the African continent.”
Tola’s research illustrates how African knowledge systems shaped the agricultural and cultural landscapes of the early American South. By bringing figures like Bilali Mohammed to the forefront, her work not only recovers intellectual histories that have long been obscured but also highlights the ongoing relevance of these communities.
Together, Myriam and Tola represent the breadth and depth of IHPST’s contributions to global and interdisciplinary scholarship. Their projects recover voices that have been marginalized, deepen our understanding of the long eighteenth century, and demonstrate how collaborative mentorship can transform early-career research. As they prepare their manuscripts for publication and continue building connections across ASA and ASECS communities, their work stands as a testament to the impact that rigorous, inclusive historical scholarship can achieve.