University of Rochester President Sarah Mangelsdorf will present the Frederick Douglass Medal during a ceremony on Thursday, March 31, to E. Patrick Johnson, dean of the School of Communication at Northwestern University and the Annenberg University Professor, according to a University of Rochester news release.
The honor recognizes Johnson's scholarship and community engagement in the field of Black studies. The out gay dean was nominated by Jeffrey McCune Jr., an associate professor of African American literature and culture at Rochester and the director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies.
Johnson is the award-winning author of two books—Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2003) and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South-An Oral History (University of North Carolina Press, 2008)—as well as an essayist and public performer. He is also the founder and director of Black Arts Initiative at Northwestern, a multicultural collaboration of Black artists and scholars.
In addition, Johnson toured more than 100 colleges for a staged reading of his book Sweet Tea.
