Five Women Academics Receive Awards

Erica Lorraine Williams, assistant professor of anthropology at Spelman College in Atlanta, received the First Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association and the University of Illinois Press.

Dr. Williams book, Ambiguous Entanglements: Sex, Race, and Tourism in Bahia, will be published by the University of Illinois Press. The book is based on her Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology at Stanford University.

Deanna Haunsperger, professor of mathematics at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, is the recipient of the M. Gweneth Humphreys Award  for Mentorship of Undergraduate Women from the Association of Women in Mathematics.

The award is named after Dr. Humphreys who earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1935 at the age of 23. She went on to teach for more than three decades at what is now Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia.

Ilona M. Figat, an enterprise consultant at the Delaware Center for Enterprise Development at Delaware State University was named the 2011 Outstanding Entrepreneurship Educator at the 29th annual Entrepreneurship Education Forum in Cincinnati, Ohio.

She is launching a new project in 2012 that will transport a mobile training classroom to rural and underserved areas that will be used to provide entrepreneurship training classes.

Sherrill Redmon, who has served since 1993 as director of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Veteran Feminists of America. The Sophia Smith Collection is an archive of papers, documents, and other materials relating to the history and sociology of women in the United States.

CarolAnn Peterson, adjunct associate professor of social work at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, received the Humanitarian Award from Face Forward, a nonprofit organization that finances reconstructive surgeries for women and children who have been victims of  domestic violence.

Peterson is the founder of Peterson Professional Alliance, a consulting firm that helps corporations recognize and understand the impact of domestic violence on their employees. She is currently at work on a textbook and is constructing the curriculum for an online course in the master of social work program at USC.