Jesse Olsavsky, assistant professor of history at Duke Kunshan University, has been named one of four finalists for the prestigious Harriet Tubman Prize for his book, The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861.
The award, organized annually by the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, honors “the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World.”
Olsavsky’s book discusses the remarkable history of vigilance committees—antislavery organizations that helped over 10,000 enslaved people escape from slavery.
Currently, Olsavsky is a visiting research fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and Yale University. He is working on a sequel that examines how 19th-century antislavery thought influenced 20th-century Pan-Africanism, an ideology that influenced both African decolonization efforts and anti-racist movements in the United States.
At Duke Kunshan, Olsavsky teaches and researches broadly in social movements, U.S. history and politics, and African American history. In particular, his work focuses on the history of African slavery in the Americas, the international movements to abolish African slavery and the intellectual history of pan-Africanism.
His research has been funded by such institutions as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History and the Schomburg Center for the Study of African American Life and Culture.
Olsavsky has a B.A. in history and German literature from the University of Toledo, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in American and Atlantic history from the University of Pittsburgh.
For more information about the Harriet Tubman Prize and its recipients, visit the Schomburg Center’s official announcement.
