UW News

December 4, 2019

Joy Williamson-Lott honored for book on civil rights, higher education in South during Jim Crow era

UW News

Joy Williamson-Lott, uw grad school dean and professor of education receives honor for her 2018 book Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order

Joy Williamson-Lott

Joy Williamson-Lott, dean of the UW Graduate School and a professor of education, has been honored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities for her book “Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order,” published in 2018 by Teachers College Press.

The association has named the book winner of its annual Frederic W. Ness Book Award for outstanding contributions to the understanding and improvement of liberal education.

“This well-researched volume explores how the black freedom struggle and the anti-Vietnam War movement dovetailed with faculty and student activism in the South to undermine the traditional role of higher education and bring about social change,” the association said in a news release.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the association, praised the book as well, adding that it demonstrates the power of student and faculty activism to advance social justice causes by “disrupting entrenched racialist structures within the academy.”

Thanking the association for the honor, Williamson-Lott said: “History teaches us that we must remain staunch stewards of academic freedom and freedom of speech at our colleges and universities. I am gratified to know that I join so many of my colleagues in that endeavor.”

The award, which includes an honorarium of $2,000, was established in 1979 to honor the association’s ninth president. Williamson-Lott will receive the honor at the association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in January 2020.

In other book news:

Classic Seattle history returns: University of Washington Press is republishing UW English professor Roger Sale‘s well-loved 1976 reflections on his city, its history and its possible futures, “Seattle, Past to Present.” The new edition has an introduction by Seattle writer Knute Berger.

Pacific Northwest Quarterly called the book “an exhilarating critique of Seattle’s birth, growth, sickness, health, promise and fulfillment. Any serious student of Seattle or of recent urban history will now read Roger Sale, and with good reason.”

The new edition’s cover also drew attention from Spine, a magazine about book design, which praised its “gorgeous colors and dynamic angles” in a recent roundup of university press covers.

Sale, who died in 2017, taught for decades at the UW and is remembered in this essay by colleague John Webster, associate professor of English.

"Aiiieee!" coedited by UW English professor Shawn Wong gets republished

Shawn Wong

“Aiiieeeee!: An anthology of Asian American Writers” gets third edition: UW Press in November published the third edition of this collection first released in 1974 and edited by Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Wong, UW professor of English.

The New York Times Book Review wrote: “The stories are … strewn with new insights buried in the flesh of the narrative; they illuminate areas of darkness in the hidden experiences of a people who had been little more than exotic figments of someone else’s imagination.”

Read an essay by Wong about the book’s creation: “How a  Literary Origin Story Began with a Shout.”

“Aiiieeeee!” is part of UW Press’s Classics of Asian American Literature series.

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