Frances Smith Foster, who recently retired as the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Emory University, was named winner of the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize from Brandeis University. She will share the $25,000 prize with Professor Clayborne Carson of Stanford University. The prize recognizes “outstanding and lasting contributions to racial, ethnic, and religious relations.” She will be awarded the prize later this month.
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).