The president of George Mason University has announced that Professor Wendi Manuel-Scott, Associate Professor and Mason's Director of African and African American Studies Program, will be the inaugural recipient of the prestigious Alcalde Family Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion. This award will be conferred to Dr. Manuel-Scott during Commencement 2017. Graduates and their guests will receive a program presenting Dr. Manuel-Scott's signal accomplishments. Some highlights of those accomplishments from that program appear below:
Dr. Wendi Manuel-Scott's scholarship and teaching explore the diverse processes that shape African-American experiences—from Atlantic World slavery and Jim Crow segregation to systems of incarceration and black women's resistance movements. Critical explorations of freedom and liberation inform her work with students, scholars, teachers, and the public at large. Dr. Manuel-Scott has found that the Mason community truly values learning about the complex legacies of inclusion that define our interconnected world.
The Virginia Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy and National Trust for Historic Preservation have supported Dr. Manuel-Scott's more recent research on Antebellum and Jim Crow Virginia. One of her projects produced a long-running exhibit titled, “Separate and Unequal in Buckingham County: Segregation and Desegregation in Virginia”; another project uncovered and narrated African-American civic leadership in Falls Church, Virginia. With five undergraduate historians and colleague Benedict Carton, she is currently reconstructing the life stories of people who worked on the plantation of George Mason, the eighteenth-century colonial patriot. Dr. Manuel-Scott and her team hope their archival discoveries will open a deeper discussion about our university’s namesake and inspire the creation of a campus memorial representing the humanity of the enslaved children of Gunston Hall, George Mason's Fairfax home.
Dr. Manuel-Scott, your History and Art History colleagues and students celebrate your great honor. Congratulations!
April 25, 2017