Associate Professor of History Ousmane Traoré's first book, Slavery, Resistance, and Identity in Early Modern West Africa: The Ethnic-State of Gajaaga (Cambridge University Press, 2023), has been selected as one of four finalists for the prestigious Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded annually by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The prize committee praises it as "a monumental book based on thoroughly new and important archival research" and a "careful and revelatory" work that "shows how different Atlantic enslavement was to existing practices of dependence in Senegambia, and how crucial the violence of the Atlantic trafficking system was to the rise of new models of ethnic identity in West Africa."