Camille Owens Receives Honorable Mention for "Like Children"
Congratulations to Professor Camille Owens!
Professor Owens received an honorable mention from the Modern Language Association of America for her book Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America.
The committee writes: "Camille Owens’s Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America is a groundbreaking study of the “Black prodigy” and its role in shaping ideas of humanity and intelligence. Owens shows how narratives that appear to celebrate exceptional Black children actually participate in racial dehumanization, offering an original and counterintuitive insight."
The Modern Language Association of America and its over 20,000 members in 100 countries work to strengthen the study and teaching of languages and literature. Founded in 1883, the MLA provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy.
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Like Children recenters the history of American childhood around black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts. Through the stories of black and disabled children spectacularized as prodigies, Owens tracks enduring white investment in black children’s power and value, and a pattern of black children performing beyond white containment. She reconstructs the extraordinary interventions and inventions of figures such as the early American poet Phillis Wheatley, the nineteenth-century pianist Tom Wiggins (Blind Tom), a child known as “Bright” Oscar Moore, and the early-twentieth century “Harlem Prodigy,” Philippa Schuyler, situating each against the racial, gendered, and developmental rubrics by which they were designated prodigious exceptions. Ultimately, Like Children displaces frames of exclusion and dehumanization to explain black children’s historical and present predicament, revealing the immense cultural significance that black children have negotiated and what they have done to reshape the human in their own acts.
Like Children was also a finalist for the 2025 PROSE Awards: Literature.