Four Women Scholars Honored With Major Awards

Kirsten Pai Buick, an associate professor in the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico, has been selected to receive the 2015 David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. She will receive the award in Atlanta on May 2. The $25,000 prize honors an original and important contribution to the field of African American art or art history. Dr. Buick is the author of Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Duke University Press, 2010).

Dr. Buick is a graduate of the University of Chicago. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Michigan.

Kara Gravley-Stack, director of diversity initiatives and interim director of the Office of Multicultural Programs at North Dakota State University in Fargo, has been selected as the winner of the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. She will receive the award in Washington, D.C. on March 17.

Dr. Gravely-Stack is a graduate of Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. She earned a master’s degree at Minnesota State University, Moorhead and a doctorate in institutional analysis at North Dakota State University.

Katherine Newman, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, received the 2015 Public Understanding of Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association. Dr. Newman was named provost in 2014 after serving on the sociology department faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She is the author of 12 books, including her latest work, After Freedom: The Rise of the Post-Apartheid Generation in Democratic South Africa (Beacon Press, 2014).

Dr. Newman is graduate of the University of California at San Diego, where she majored in sociology and philosophy. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Retha Hill, a professor in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, received the Louis R. Lautier Award for Career Achievement at the Southern Regional Press Institute at Savannah State University in Georgia.

Professor Hill joined the faculty at Arizona State University in 2007 after serving as an executive for Black Entertainment Television.