Shennette Garrett-Scott and Fara Dabhoiwala are the recipients of the 2025 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, awarded for biographical works-in-progress that significantly advance our understanding of the Black experience. The selection committee was particularly struck by the engaging clarity of their prose and how these distinguished academics bring complex histories vividly to life for a broad readership.

Garrett-Scott won for her project, Titan: The Life of Maggie Lena Walker, a biography of the pioneering early 20th-century financier and civic leader. Walker was the first Black woman in the United States to charter and lead a bank, and her visionary leadership helped establish Richmond, Virginia’s Jackson Ward as a nationally recognized “cradle of Black capitalism.”

Dabhoiwala won for his project, Black Genius: In Search of Francis Williams, which explores the life of an Enlightenment-era polymath born to enslaved African parents in Jamaica at the close of the 17th century. Educated as a free man in England, Williams later returned to Jamaica, where, as a well-positioned figure, he established a school for free Black children.

Shennette Garrett-Scott is an award-winning scholar and public historian. She serves as the Paul and Debra Gibbons Professor and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Tulane University. A leading authority on Black business history, she specializes in African American women’s enterprise, labor, and activism. Her acclaimed book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (2019), has received numerous honors, including awards from the Southern Historical Association, the Association of Black Women Historians, and the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Her forthcoming book, Black Enterprise: How Black Capitalism Made America (W. W. Norton), is slated for publication in 2026.

Fara Dabhoiwala is a Professor of History at Princeton University, specializing in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the English-speaking world from the Middle Ages to the present. Prior to joining Princeton, he spent two decades on the faculty at the University of Oxford, where he is now a life fellow of All Souls College and Exeter College. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and the London Review of Books, and has produced radio and television programs for the BBC and other outlets. Dabhoiwala is the author of the widely acclaimed The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (2012), which has been translated into several languages, and of What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, forthcoming this year.

BIO’s Rollin Fellowship, named for Frances (“Frank”) Anne Rollin Whipper, one of America’s first recorded African American biographers, seeks to help remediate the disproportionate reflection of Black lives and voices in published biography and to encourage diversity in the field. BIO launched the Rollin Fellowship in 2020 and first presented an award of $2,000 to a single winner in May 2021 and again in 2022. As of May 2023, with a generous donation from Kitty Kelley, BIO increased the award to $5,000 each for two winners. The fellowship also awards the recipients a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO Conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels. This year’s Rollin Prize Committee consisted of Eric K. Washington (chair), Tamara Payne, and A’Lelia Bundles.