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Lillian Faderman receives national award

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Dr. Lillian Faderman has been named recipient of a prestigious national award from the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

Faderman was selected for the 2002 Founders Distinguished Senior Scholar Award. It honors a woman scholar for a lifetime of outstanding research, college/university teaching, publications and positive impact upon women in her profession and in the community.

Faderman will be recognized at the AAUW Leadership Conference banquet this summer in Washington, D.C.

"I'm thrilled and honored to receive this award," said Faderman. "AAUW is such an important organization in encouraging higher education for women, and it means so much to me that they've recognized me for this national award."

She joined the ranks of the Fresno State faculty in 1967, just after earning her doctorate in English at UCLA. Her impact after 35 years is considerable, said Dr. J. Michael Ortiz, Fresno State provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, who nominated Faderman for the award.

"It would be difficult to conceive of her field of study today without Dr. Faderman's many contributions," he said. "Her books have broken new ground in the area of sexuality and gender, have been academic best-sellers, reissued in paperback and translated into foreign languages as diverse as Turkish and Japanese. She is reaching the diverse audiences that she has targeted since the beginning of her career," Ortiz said.

Faderman designed and co-founded the Women's Studies Program at Fresno State in 1971, one of the first such programs in the country. She also developed the course Women Writers of Color, which introduces students to Asian, Latina, Native American and African American women authors emerging in this country.

Faderman is an acclaimed author and has been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her 10th book, "Naked in the Promised Land," will be published next February by Houghton Mifflin. It is a memoir covering her childhood years through age 39.

In 1982 Faderman won the university's Outstanding Professor Award and last year received the Provost's Award for Excellence in Teaching. She also won Yale University's James Brudner Award for exemplary research in 2001.

Faderman served Fresno State in the mid-70s as assistant vice president for Academic Affairs, and became the director of the Experimental College, a place where faculty and students could let their collective imaginations truly go in a free-flow of ideas.

Back to University Journal, 05/20/02 Issue