Derrick P. Alridge, assistant professor in social foundations of education, has been awarded a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2001-2002 academic year.

The $50,000 award is granted annually to outstanding scholars to pursue critical education research projects. This year, 30 fellows were selected from a pool of more than 200 scholars of education at the postdoctoral stage. As a fellow, Alridge will work on an ongoing intellectual history project which examines the educational thought of W. E. B. Du Bois.

Du Bois (1868-1963) was an African-American historian and sociologist who pioneered research on the black experience in the United States. His work paved the way for the civil rights, Pan-African and Black Power movements in this country.

Alridge has spent much of his academic career bringing an historical context to education issues. His scholarship focuses on African-American educational and intellectual history. He is currently working on a book that will focus on the educational thought of the renowned African-American leader.

"David Levering Lewis has written two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies on Du Bois and others have written about Du Bois' social and political thought. But to date, there are no works that look exclusively at Du Bois' educational thought," he says.

Alridge began specific research for this book last summer while he was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Harvard University. He will begin work funded by the new Spencer fellowship this fall and further research and writing in the springs of 2002 and 2003. He intends to have a complete draft of the manuscript by the end of 2004.

Alridge will do research in the archives at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Fisk University in Nashville, Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Al., and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

"My work at these sites will entail archival research of the development of Du Bois' thinking about education while he was an undergraduate at Fisk and as a graduate student at Harvard. It will also examine Du Bois' educational thought via his correspondence and dialogue with scholars such as Carter G. Woodson, Anna Julia Cooper, Alexander Crummell, Horace Mann Bond, and his other contemporaries," says Alridge.

Last summer, Alridge studied the history of the civil rights movement with historians Waldo Martin, Patricia Sullivan, Leon Litwack and the philosopher Cornell West as a NEH Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at Harvard University. From this work he developed a UGA class titled "Education, Schooling, and the Civil Rights Movement: An Historical and Policy Analysis."

Alridge received the 2000 Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).

Activism is a defining aspect of Alridge, who served as vice president of UGA's Black Faculty and Staff Organization in 1998-2000 and as faculty adviser for the student NAACP chapter in 1999-2000.

He joined the UGA faculty in 1997. He was an instructor in African and African-American Studies at Penn State University from 1995-97 and a teaching assistant in educational policy there from 1993-95. He taught history in Columbia, S.C., high school from 1989-93.

Alridge received his Ph.D. in educational theory and policy from Penn State University, his master's in history/social science education from Penn State University and his bachelor's in history from Winthrop University.

Wednesday, May 16, 2001
Writer: Michael Childs, 706/542-5889, mchilds@coe.uga.edu
Contact: Derrick Alridge, 706/8113, dalridge@coe.uga.edu