Jeff Forret '95, PhD, is making some history of his own.
Already recognized as one of the foremost scholars on the subject of slavery in the pre-Civil War South, the St. Ambrose history graduate has been awarded the prestigious 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his third book, Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South. The prize is awarded annually by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University to the best book written in English on the topics of slavery or abolition.
Forret, a professor of history at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, will accept the $25,000 award at a banquet on Jan. 31, 2017 in New York.
Slave Against Slave previously was a runner-up in the 2016 Prose Award competition and Forret also was awarded a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Research Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities stipend to assist with research for his next book. He previously had published two other books on the topic of slavery and was a contributor to the Issues and Controversies in History textbook series.
Forret, whose sister, Monica Forret '88, PhD, is an SAU professor of Business Administration and Managerial Studies, said in an interview last spring that connections formed at and through St. Ambrose helped to fuel his growth as a leading slavery scholar. He said he grew personally and academically through his career at SAU.
"I would say it's all about the people you meet there," he said. "It's obviously not the biggest school nor the most famous school. But it was the most perfect school I could have gone to at the time. I was a regular kid from rural Iowa, and I didn't want to venture too far from home because my world was pretty small back then."
He credited former SAU history professors Rev. George McDaniel '66 and Jon Stauff, PhD, and current English Department professors Carl Herzig, PhD, and Barbara Pitz, PhD, as well as retired English professor Owen Rogal, PhD, for enhancing the tools he has used to succeed.
"I wound up over the course of my academic career, encountering all the right people at all the right times," Forret said. "I wound up at other places that helped further that career, but it all began at St. Ambrose."
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