Bradley R. Dewey Scholarship Award

Alison Kibler is a model of scholarly excellence at a liberal arts college. She is a widely published leader in American cultural history, a public historian whose community-based projects draw in a large number of Franklin & Marshall College students, and she serves in a quiet mentoring role for pre-tenure colleagues, especially in their scholarly development.   

Professor Kibler’s prolific scholarship record of the past three decades is, indeed, impressive. In addition to her many peer-reviewed journal articles, she published two books with the University of North Carolina Press: “Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890-1930” (2015) and “Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville” (1999). The considerable fellowship and grant support for her projects, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the ACLS, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, is testimony to her stellar reputation. Her current book project, Liberate the Media: Feminist Television Activism in the 1970s, has received funding to visit archives in Baltimore, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, and Smith College’s archives.

Professor Kibler’s steadfast commitment to community-engaged scholarship is at the center of her work. In the mid-2000s, she undertook research about the desegregation of County Pool in Lancaster and published two pieces about that issue. Her current multimedia project, Lancaster Vice, serves as a history of the anti-vice campaign in Lancaster in the early 20th century during a period in which the city was known as “wide-open” with a flourishing commercial sex trade and a vibrant gay male subculture. The project includes developing a walking tour, which she now leads, and a podcast.

Almost all of her research engages our students, as Hackman Scholars or research assistants. She is extremely committed to training young scholars. She takes time to train teams of students and engage them actively in every phase of her projects. She truly loves the research process and wants to impart this love to a new generation of historians.

Alison Kibler is a model citizen of the campus and community. Her expansive practice of scholarship truly fulfills the Bradley R. Dewey Scholarship Award criteria of a faculty member, “whose research efforts reflect and inspire excellence, and enlighten teaching.”

M. Alison Kibler, Professor of American Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies, Bradley R. Dewey Scholarship Award

Professor Kibler’s current multimedia project, Lancaster Vice, serves as a history of the anti-vice campaign in Lancaster in the early 20th century. The project includes developing a walking tour, which she now leads, and a podcast.

« PreviousNext »