Category: Albert Christ-Janer Award

Jennifer Palmer, associate professor in the Franklin College Department of History, is an internationally recognized historian whose scholarship reshapes understanding of race, gender, and slavery in the French Atlantic world. Palmer’s research integrates legal, social, and cultural history to examine how colonial subjects—particularly women and people of African descent—navigated family, property, and power across France and its Caribbean empire. Her prize-winning first book, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic, transformed the field by revealing how everyday relationships and household structures shaped racial and legal regimes on both sides of the Atlantic. Palmer’s current book project, Possession: Gender, Race, and Ownership in the French Caribbean, offers a new interpretation of property law by centering women’s legal and extralegal practices within imperial systems of exclusion. Through sustained archival innovation and conceptual rigor, Palmer has established lasting international impact in early modern Atlantic history. 

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2025

Rielle Navitski, associate professor in the Franklin College Department of Theatre and Film Studies, is a leading scholar in Latin American film and media studies. Her research explores the intersections of cinema and transnational exchange, challenging conventional narratives in film history. She has authored two influential monographs: “Public Spectacles of Violence,” which examines sensational cinema and journalism in early 20th-century Mexico and Brazil, and “Transatlantic Cinephilia,” which investigates networks of film culture between Latin America and France during the mid-20th century. Navitski’s scholarship, based on extensive archival research across multiple countries, has reshaped understandings of Latin American film’s role in global media history. She also has co-edited an open-access textbook on Latinx media and an anthology titled “Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin America, 1896-1960.” Recognized with prestigious fellowships and awards, Navitski’s work continues to advance the fields of film history, cultural studies, and Latin American studies, making a lasting impact on those disciplines.