Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) is one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies. It has a membership of more than 4,000 scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines including all the natural sciences. Its membership includes at least 200 Nobel Prize winners and more than 50 winners of a Pulitzer Prize. This year, 198 new fellows were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Among the new fellows are three African American women with ties to academia.
• Paula T. Hammond is the David H. Koch Professor in Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
• Natasha Trethewey is the Poet Laureate of the United States and the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing and holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University in Atlanta.
article via jbhe.com
Posts tagged as “Emory University”
ATLANTA, Ga. — The founder of one of America’s first modeling agencies to represent women of color has placed her papers at Emory University.
Pioneering entrepreneur Ophelia DeVore Mitchell set up the New-York-based Grace Del Marco in 1946 at a time when it was almost unthinkable for black women to be recognized in the media for their beauty.
In its early days, the groundbreaking agency paved the way for African-Americans to pursue careers in the fashion and entertainment industries.
Agency launched black superstars
Indeed, the agency and modeling school helped launch the early careers of actresses Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson.
It also represented people such as Gail Fisher; Richard Roundtree; Trudy Haynes, one of the first black female TV reporters; and Helen Williams, one of the first African-American fashion models to break into the mainstream.
DeVore’s extensive collection consists of thousands of items, from photos to scrapbooks relating to her time at the helm of the agency, to lengthy correspondence from her other business ventures.
In an interview with theGrio, DeVore, who is surprisingly lucid for her 92 years, says when she co-founded Grace Del Marco, “people of color didn’t even count in the beauty industry, not just in America, but across the world.”
Her drive, she says, came from her own personal experiences working briefly as a model, mainly for Ebony Magazine, from the age of 16.
Though DeVore is of mixed-race origin, the South-Carolina-born beauty became acutely aware of how black people were depicted in the media and subsequently made it her mission to change these images.
Two years later, in 1948, Devore established the Ophelia DeVore School of Charm, where young black women learned etiquette, poise and posture, speech and ballet, and self-presentation.
The archives, which span from the 1940s to 1990s, document the changing attitudes and images of non-whites in the beauty industry, says DeVore’s son, James D. Carter, who took over the charm school for a number of years and later ran other aspects of the Devore businesses.
Pamela Gunter-Smith has been selected to become the fourth president of York College in York, Pennsylvania. She will begin her new role on July 1. York College enrolls about 5,800 students in undergraduate and graduate programs. African Americans make up about 4 percent of the undergraduate student body.
Since 2006, Dr. Gunter-Smith has been provost and academic vice president at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Previously, she was the Porter Professor of Physiology at Spelman College in Atlanta. At Spelman, she chaired the biology department for 10 years and was the program director of the Center for Biomedical and Behavioral Research.
Dr. Gunter-Smith is a graduate of Spelman College. She earned a Ph.D. in physiology at Emory University in Atlanta and did postdoctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.
article via Spelman College Graduate to Become President of York College in Pennsylvania : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
Image courtesy of Cowan’s Auctions, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Fordham University is launching a project to create a database which lists the burial grounds of enslaved African-Americans in the United States. Sandra Arnold, a history student in Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, has been leading the ambitious project, reports Fordham University’s eNewsroom.
Irma Watkins-Owens, Ph.D., is the co-director and an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Fordham. The two are working closely with advisers from several other American universities, including Emory, Yale, and the College of William and Mary.
Earl Lewis, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University, has been selected as the next president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The foundation, headquartered in New York City, has over $5 billion in assets and in 2011 issued $230 million in grants. Dr. Lewis will take on his new role in March 2013.
via Earl Lewis to Lead the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.