Brenda Stevenson, the Nickoll Family Professor of History at UCLA, has been selected to receive the 2020 Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal presented by the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association.
The Wilbur Lucius Cross Meda is the highest honor given by the Yale Graduate School to one of its alumni, and it is presented each year to a select few. The medal recognizes distinguished achievements in scholarship, teaching, academic administration and public service — all areas in which Cross, a former dean, excelled.
Cross was a scholar of distinction in English literature. He taught at the Sheffield Scientific School, the precursor to Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and served as dean during the graduate school’s reorganization into its present form. He rejuvenated the Yale Review as its editor.
Stevenson is a social historian and scholar of slavery and the antebellum south who also teaches in UCLA’s Department of African American Studies.
She is the author of several books including, most recently, “What is Slavery?” (Wiley, 2015), and the award-winning “The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the LA Riots,” (Oxford University Press, 2013), for which she received the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism Award. She is currently at work on two new books: a history of the slave family from the colonial through the antebellum eras, and a history of slave women. Her other honors include a 2015 Guggenheim fellowship and a National Humanities Center fellowship.