Harley Recognized with Interdisciplinary Award

Associate Professor

SHARON HARLEY was awarded the 2023 Honorary Feminist Sociologist Distinction Award by the Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS).

This award honors contributions by feminists who are not sociologists, but who have made notable interdisciplinary contributions to feminist theory and praxis.

Harley focuses her research and teaching on Black women’s leadership and crusades for justice, as well as labor history and racial and gender politics in the United States and globally. She is completing a biography of Nannie Helen Burroughs, an early feminist leader in the Black Baptist church movement and founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C, for the Yale University Press Black Lives Series.

Harley is also finishing a scholarly volume of essays and podcasts of participants in her UMD- and Mellon Foundation-funded “African/Black Diaspora” Research Seminar.

“While honoring my scholarship and my history of engagement and leadership of multiple cross-disciplinary projects, this SWS Award recognizes the interdisciplinarity of African American and feminist scholarship as fields of study, and also recognizes UMD’s decades-long embrace and support of interdisciplinarity in its faculty hires and research funding,” Harley said. •