Touré Reed, an associate professor of U.S. and African American history, has received the 2013 David Strand Diversity Achievement Award.
He is the 20th recipient of the award, which was established and endowed by President Emeritus David Strand to honor a faculty or staff member whose efforts result in heightened sensitivity to diversity on campus.
Reed was recognized at the Founders Day Convocation, and will receive a monetary award and have his name added to the Strand Diversity Achievement Award plaque on the Wall of Fame in the Bone Student Center.
In the Department of History, Reed enthusiastically teaches course that explore race, ethnicity and gender. He has twice received recognition for his teaching excellence by winning the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Dean of Students Office and the University Teaching Initiative Award.
Through his research, he has promoted a greater understanding of diversity. His book, Not Alms But Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950, and his coauthored book, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, resulted in Reed conducting numerous conference presentations, radio broadcasts, and TV appearances.
In 2009, he was selected by President Al Bowman to chair the University Diversity Task Force that conducted a comprehensive campus climate assessment of diversity and inclusion. As a result, Reed was named chair of the editorial committee for the monthly online newsletter Identity: Valuing Our Diversity that received national recognition by winning the 2011 Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communications.
In the summers of 2010 and 2011, Reed garnered a prestigious Kluge Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Library of Congress to conduct research on his next book project, New Deal Civil Rights: Class Politics and the Quest for Racial Equality, 1933-1948. As part of the fellowship, he delivered an invited talk at the Library of Congress, Industrial Democracy and the Civil Rights Establishment of the 1930s.
Reed earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies from Hampshire College and his M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Past recipients of the Strand Diversity Achievement Award are Alison Bailey, Nancy Tolson, Christopher Horvath, Kim Pereira, Marilyn Boyd, Maria Canabal, Madeleine Hoss, Ming-Gon John Lian, Maura Toro-Morn, Louis Perez, Ron Strickland, Julia Visor, Savario Mungo, Paula Ressler, Ronald Swan, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Rick Lewis, Beverly Nance and Robert Lee.
