Professors Frances Smith Foster and Clayborne Carson will share the $25,000 Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize from Brandeis University. The prize recognizes “outstanding and lasting contributions to racial, ethnic, and religious relations.”
Frances Smith Foster recently retired as the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Emory University. Professor Smith, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego, is the author or more than a dozen books including Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Ante-Bellum Slave Narrative (Greenwood, 1979) and Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women Writers, 1746-1892 (Indiana University Press, 1993). One of her most recent books is Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Clayborne Carson is professor of history and the Ronnie Lott Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. He is the editor of the King Papers Project which has published six volumes of the correspondence, published writings, speeches, and unpublished work of Dr. King. He is the author of Malcolm X: The FBI File and co-author of African-American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom.
Professor Carson holds bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles.
