NASHVILLE , Tenn. – Vanderbilt’s Tracy Sharpley-Whiting is the winner of the 2006 Horace Mann Medal. The medal is awarded each year to a Brown University Graduate School alumnus or alumna who has made significant contributions to scholarly research.
Sharpley-Whiting, director of the African American and Diaspora Studies program and the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies at Vanderbilt, will accept the award on Sept. 30 at Brown.
The Horace Mann Medal is named after a Brown alumnus and state lawmaker who helped pass legislation to create the nation’s first state board of education and went on to serve in Congress, where he was a vocal opponent of slavery. The medal was established in 2003, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Brown University Graduate School.
“I am simply over the moon,” Sharpley-Whiting said. “I feel especially honored to be in the company of such distinguished Brown alums.”
Previous Horace Mann Medal winners are geophysicist Maria Zuber; Wen-Hsiung Li, discoverer of the molecular clock; and Joel D. Scheraga, national program director for the Global Change Research Program in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development.
Sharpley-Whiting’s research includes feminist theory, Paris during the jazz age, film, hip hop culture and Francophone studies. She has just completed one book on young black women and hip hop culture and is at work on another on black women in Jazz Age Paris.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 343-1271
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu