Make a Difference

North Hall Endowed Chair Professor Waverly Duck received the Russell Sage Foundation fellowship for 2024–2025.

During the fellowship, he will investigate how the concept of cooperation — in society, relationships, organizations and institutions — is hindered by exclusion and inequality. His study of a “hidden social order” will shine light on the experiences of historically marginalized individuals, particularly racial, gender and LGBTQ+ minorities, he said.

UC Santa Barbara Black Studies Professor Jeffrey Stewart is one of the newest members to be elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 

A historian by training, who received his doctoral degree in American Studies from Yale University in 1979, Stewart is perhaps most widely known in recent years for his acclaimed biography of Alain Locke.

However, in addition to tracing the intersection of history and art through scholarly books and articles, Stewart’s body of work also includes the visual arts — in particular, curatorial work.

Read more about Jeffrey Stewart's Award

In a testament to his musical legacy, esteemed Composer and CCS Music Composition Faculty Emeritus Earl Louis Stewart has been awarded the Judges Citation: Special Orchestral Accomplishment in Jazz in the 2023-24 American Prize Competition for his “Symphony #5 Homage to Swing."

“To me, there is nothing more American than jazz.”

— Earl Louis Stewart, CCS Music Composition Faculty Emeritus

Jeffrey C. Stewart is a professor of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, since 2007, when he was hired as Chair of the Department of Black Studies, a position he served in until 2016. During his tenure as chair he advanced a number of on campus projects, including the North Hall 1968 Takeover Display, which opened in 2015, and Jeffrey’s Jazz Coffeehouse, which opened in 2016, an immersive pop-up jazz experience in Isla Vista to accompany his course, The History of Jazz.

Jeffrey’s most recent book, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, is one of the few books of history that has won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

American composer Earl Louis Stewart has won a 2018 Global Music Awards Gold Medal in the category Counterpoint Classical/Jazz for his composition Homage to Swing (Identity 158), which received its world premiere at Schoenberg Hall on February 5, 2017. The four movement symphony, which represents the merging of swing with traditional symphonic design, was the final work on Swinging to a World of Strings, an inter-departmental orchestra concert programed by Professor Cheryl L. Keyes to highlight world music traditions.

Terence Keel, an assistant professor of history and of Black studies at UC Santa Barbara received this year’s Harold J. Plous Award.

One of the university’s most prestigious faculty honors, the award is given annually to an assistant professor from the humanities, social sciences or natural sciences who has demonstrated exceptional achievement in research, teaching and service.

Presented by the College of Letters and Science, the award was established in 1957 to honor the memory of Harold J. Plous, an assistant professor of economics.