Four Scholars Honored by the Southern Association for Women Historians

The Southern Association for Women Historians was founded in 1970 in Louisville, Kentucky. Today the association has 700 members and meets each year during the annual convention of the Southern Historical Association. At this year’s recent convention, the association gave out several awards to women historians.

Tanisha C. Ford, an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, received the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for the best article on southern women’s history. Her article “SNCC Women: Denim and the Politics of Dress,” was published in the August 2013 issue of the Journal of Southern History. Dr. Ford holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University in Bloomington. She also earned a master’s degree in Afro-American studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Carole Emberton, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo of the State University of New York System received the Willie Lee Rose Prize for the best book on southern history written by a woman or women. Dr. Emberton was honored for her book Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the South After the Civil War (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Dr. Emberton is a graduate of the University of Chicago. She holds a master’s degree from Loyola University in Chicago and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

Katy Simpson Smith is an adjunct professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. She won the Julia Spruill Prize for the best book published on southern women’s history for her work We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835 (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). Dr. Smith is also the author of the novel The Story of Land and Sea (Harper, 2014). Dr. Smith is a native of Jackson, Mississippi. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She earned a master of fine arts degree from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Shannon Frystak, an associate professor of history at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, received the Anne Firor Scott Mid-Career Fellowship. The fellowship is given to mid-career scholars who are working on a second book or equivalent project in southern and/or gender history. Dr. Frystak is the author of the book, Our Minds on Freedom: Women and the Struggle for Black Equality in Louisiana, 1924-1967 (Louisiana State University Press, 2009). She is a graduate of Bowling Green State University in Ohio and holds a master’s degree from the University of New Orleans and a Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire.