Professor Emilie Amt is the recipient of the 2018 Nelson R. Burr Prize from the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church.
Amt is Hildegarde Pilgram Professor of History at Hood College and chairs the history department.
The prize honors “Down from the Balcony: African Americans and Episcopal Congregations in Washington County, Maryland, 1800-1864,” her essay in the March 2017 issue of Anglican & Episcopal History.
Her most recent book is The Latin Cartulary of Godstow Abbey, published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy in 2014. Her professional focus is on the experience of religious women and in 12th- and 13th-century English government, finance, and war.
For the last eight years she has been researching slavery in western Maryland. This work grew out of a desire at her church, St. Mark Church-Lappans, to know more about the enslaved people who attended when it was built in 1849.
Her work has also contributed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Trail of Souls Pilgrimage in the Diocese of Maryland.
The prize honors the legacy of Nelson R. Burr, author of the two-volume Critical Bibliography of Religion in America (Princeton University Press, 1961) and other works.
Adapted from the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church
Matthew Townsend is a Halifax-based freelance journalist and volunteer advocate for survivors of sexual misconduct in Anglican settings. He served as editor of the Anglican Journal from 2019 to 2021 and communications missioner for the Anglican Diocese of Quebec from 2019 to 2022. He and his wife recently entered catechism class in the Orthodox Church in America.
