Contact: Robbie Ward
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A Mississippi State communication faculty member is receiving a National Endowment for the Humanities award for summer study at Harvard University.
While at the Boston, Mass., institution, assistant professor Brenda Edgerton-Webster will expand her knowledge of the American civil rights movement at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
The intensive, four-week program is designed to assist her and others from across the United States with research and teaching; specifically, to better frame the civil rights movement within a broader context of American history. In addition to readings and discussions with leading authorities, the participants will review new and leading academic research based on oral histories, memoirs and documentaries, among other sources.
Edgerton-Webster came to MSU three years ago and received her doctorate in journalism history from the University of Missouri-Columbia. In October, her doctoral research will be recognized with a Margaret A. Blanchard Dissertation Honorable Mention Award by the American Journalism Historians Association in Seattle, Wash.
Her academic investigation has focused on the communication and journalism roles of women during the Mississippi Freedom Summers, a period of black voter registration drives that began in 1964. Her award-winning doctoral dissertation details the often- unrecognized efforts of female Mississippians and their counterparts from the North and elsewhere during the period.
As a part of her research, Edgerton-Webster developed a theory she calls "Afro-pragmatic Womanism." It explains how older Southern black women promoted, through journalism and communication, black men in leading public roles in the movement instead of seeking more credit for themselves.
In the fall semester, she will be teaching an MSU course on the history of African-American media. As part of the experience, class members will interview various West Point citizens who participated in Freedom Summer.
Harvard's Du Bois Institute is named for the first African-American to receive a doctor of philosophy degree in 1895. Its namesake, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963), was a United States educator and critic who became one of the early leaders of the NAACP, the civil rights organization founded in 1910.
NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: For more information, contact Dr. Edgerton-Webster at 662-325-5808 or bew95@msstate.edu.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.