Associate professor Erin Pearson’s book “Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World” was recently awarded First Book Prize.
The British Association for American Studies has awarded the 2026 Arthur Miller First Book Prize to Erin Pearson, an associate professor of English, for her book “Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World”. Pearson published the academic monograph with the University of Virginia Press in 2025.
“Grievous Entanglement” explores the most common way that people in the Atlantic world came to understand their personal connection to, and complicity with, slavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: consumption. It exemplifies the interdisciplinary approach of American Studies by examining a wide variety of media, including poetry, political cartoons, blackface minstrelsy, slave narratives, and novels produced from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries.
According to the prize committee, “Grievous Entanglement” “brings new insights to well-trodden topics — from abolitionism to blackface minstrelsy. The new insights may well shape the way that we teach this period of history…” The committee praised the book’s “rigorous research, creation of a new methodological approach, and the connections it draws between multiple different fields of study” as well as its “clear and engaging prose.”
Pearson is grateful for the many ways Elon has made this work possible, including financial support from the Department of English, Faculty Research & Development, and the Dean’s Office in Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences.