Stanford Report, June 7, 2006

Honors & Awards

JAMES L. GIBBS JR., the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor, Emeritus, has been honored with the establishment of an endowed research fund in his name. Alumni Sterling and Larry Franklin, trustees of the Morris S. Smith Foundation, established the fund last year to celebrate Gibbs’ 75th birthday next month. Sterling Franklin said that in 1968 he took an introductory course in anthropology taught by Gibbs and remembered him as “the kind of college professor you would want every student to have a chance to be taught by.” A $50,000 gift from the foundation was matched with funds from the Campaign for Undergraduate Education, plus $12,599 previously raised in 1997 by alumna Carla Winston, who studied under Gibbs as a doctoral student.

One research grant worth about $5,000 will be awarded annually by the university’s Undergraduate Research Programs in association with the departments of Anthropological Sciences and of Cultural and Social Anthropology, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Center for African Studies. Gibbs also will review applications. First preference will be given to undergraduate or co-terminal students whose proposed research is on native African peoples or the African diaspora. Usually, a grant will be awarded for summer fieldwork, but it is possible for a student to be awarded a grant for work during the school year.