Brandeis University has awarded Emory historian Carol Anderson the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize for outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and religious relations. She will accept the honor at a public lecture in October.
Emory historian Carol Anderson, whose research and award-winning books address the ways racial inequality affects the creation and unraveling of U.S. policy, has been selected for the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize.
Brandeis University announced Anderson’s selection this week. The award honors those who have made outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and religious relationships.
It comes with a $25,000 prize and medal that Brandeis will present to Anderson during a public lecture at the university in October.
“Carol Anderson’s insights into the problems of racial inequality are uniquely powerful because of the vision and rigor that she brings as a historian,” says Emory College Dean Michael A. Elliott. “I am thrilled to see her recognized in this way, and for new audiences to have the opportunity to listen to her.”
The Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Anderson’s public scholarship entered national conversations with her Washington Post analysis of white pushback against Black progress as a way to understand the Ferguson riots in 2014.
She has since become a leading scholar whose work attempts to reshape current debate through a more thorough understanding of history.
Anderson won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,” the groundbreaking book that expanded on her editorial examining white Americans’ efforts to marginalize and oppress African Americans since the Civil War.
In 2018, she published something of a sequel to that book with “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy,” which outlines the history of voter suppression to the current era.
Her most recent book, “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” takes aim at the anti-Black origins of the Second Amendment and the consequences to Black lives. It was named a New York Times Editor’s pick and Best Social Science Book of 2021 by Library Journal.
Anderson has been elected into the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also was named the 2021 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.