Honors & Awards

Spelman College, the liberal arts educational institution for women in Atlanta, announced that it will name the new 84,000-square-foot Center for Innovation & the Arts in honor of Mary Schmidt Campbell, the tenth president of the college, who is stepping down from her post.

Professor Powell teaches applied voice, art song literature and vocal pedagogy at Auburn University in Alabama. She also serves as the Women’s Chorus conductor and the Auburn University Gospel Choir’s co-conductor.

Administered by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the awards are conferred annually to eight authors writing in English anywhere in the world. Two of this year's winners are African American women with ties to the academic world.

Emery N. Brown is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Health Sciences and Technology in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT and the Warren M. Zapol Professor at Harvard Medical School.

Altheia Richardson, assistant vice president for strategic diversity leadership at Clemson University in South Carolina, has received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. The award recognizes a completed dissertation that has contributed substantially to the literature and the field of diversity and inclusion in higher education.

George Johnson of South Carolina State University, Gloria Boutte of the University of South Carolina, Joyce King of Georgia State University, and Lagarrett King of the University at Buffalo are being honored by the Society of Professors of Education.

The Frederick Douglass Medal is a joint initiative of the Office of the President and the Frederick Douglass Institute established in 2008 at the University of Rochester to honor individuals of outstanding achievement whose scholarship and community engagement honor the legacy of Frederick Douglass. Dr. Johnson teaches at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Shawn Blanton, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, received the Golden Torch Award for Lifetime Achievement in Academia from the National Society of Black Engineers. He is the founder and director of the Advanced Chip Test Laboratory at the university.

Glenn Loury is a professor of social sciences, economics, and international and public affairs at Brown University. The Bradley Prize is given to notable leaders whose accomplishments reflect the Bradley Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.

The Thomas Wyatt Turner Fellowship will support up to 10 graduate students from 1890 institutions, which are historically Black colleges and universities that are land-grant universities. They will spend the 2022-23 academic year on the Cornell University campus.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and author of five poetry collections, was the winner in the fiction category of the National Book Critics Circle Awards. She was honored for her novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.

The Dan David Prize is the largest history prize in the world. It is awarded by the Dan David Foundation at Tel Aviv University in Israel to up to nine early and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines. The honor comes with a $300,000 prize. Kristina Richardson of Queens College-CUNY and Tyrone Freeman of IUPUI are among the winners.

During the Reconstruction period, Celia Dial Saxon was one of the first African American students to attend South Carolina College, later the University of South Carolina. She taught school in Columbia, South Carolina for 57 years.

E. Patrick Johnson, dean of the School of Communication and the Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, recently received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association. He has taught at Northwestern University for more than two decades.

University of Illinois Chicago historian Barbara Ransby has been named a recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. She was selected for the award “because of the historical and political importance of her writings, her tireless work as an institution-builder and activist."

Sarah L. Price, associate dean for the College of Education at Florida A&M University, recently received the Jerry R. Thomas Distinguished Leadership Award from the American Kinesiology Association.

The Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize honors those who have made outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic, and religious relationships. The award and a $25,000 prize will be presented at a ceremony on the Brandeis campus this coming fall.

Nikky Finney, the John H. Bennett Jr. Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina, will be honored in April by the Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.

Dr. Naminata Diabate is an associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell. The prize recognizes the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English and distributed in the United States during the preceding year.

Serving as president from 1988 to 2006, Dr. David G. Carter was the first African American to lead a four-year institution of higher education in Connecticut and also in New England. He later served as chancellor of the state university system.