Congratulations to Zadie Winthrop, winner of the Norman Holmes Pearson Prize and the Percival W. Clement Prize. Each year, the American Studies department awards the Holmes Pearson for the best senior project in American Studies. Zadie’s senior essay, “Afro-Modernism and The New Negro Era’s Historicist Fabrications,” examines how early 20th-century Black artists and intellectuals constructed Black history. The thesis is broken into three chapters: the first explores philosopher and collector Alain Locke’s effort to establish a museum of African art in Harlem; the second concerns artist Aaron Douglas’ use of West African and Egyptian iconography in his magazine illustrations; and the third discusses depictions of precolonial Africa in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia: A Pageant and Shirley Graham’s opera Tom Tom: the Epic of Music and the Negro. Through exhibitions, visual art, and performance, New Negro cultural producers embraced African imagery, producing an Africentric aesthetic which posed the continent as the foundation of a Black historical narrative. These artists contested the premise that modernity originated in Europe and diffused outward, instead treating Africa as the origin point of a continuous and developing Black history. By producing a Black history that mirrored the structure of late 19th- and early 20th-century European national histories, New Negro intellectuals sought to render Black people legible as modern subjects deserving of full citizenship. Rather than a blind or unthinking imitation, this mimicry was a strategic effort to gain entrance into modernity as prescribed by the Enlightenment. New Negro intellectuals presented their works as vehicles of persuasion and fabrication, self-consciously constructing a Black historicism in pursuit of equal citizenship. The essay emphasizes this distinction, arguing that, in treating the historicist form as a myth that Black people, too, could tell, these intellectuals challenged the exclusionary logic and the universalizing claims of European historicism. They asserted a Black presence within modernity, simultaneously unsettling the epistemological foundations upon which that modernity was built.