Professor Matthew Rarey Awarded Charles Rufus Morey Book Award

Associate Professor of African and Black Atlantic Art History Matthew Rarey has won the College Art Association’s prestigious Charles Rufus Morey Book Award for his first book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023). The award honors "an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language," and is among the highest recognitions for scholarship in art history. Prof. Rarey's book traces the history of the African-associated amulets made and carried as tools of survival by enslaved people from the 17th to the 19th centuries.

Matthew Rarey has also been named the winner of the 2024 Afro Latin American/Afro-Latinx Scholarship Prize for his essay “Leave No Mark: Blackness and Inscription in the Inquisitorial Archive,” published in Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art, 2023). The award honors an outstanding scholarly essay on Afro Latin American and Afro-Latinx art, and is awarded jointly by the Association of Latin American Art and the Visual Culture Section of the Latin American Studies Association.