On Friday, October 4, Sr. Jeffrey Stewart was honored as one of the 2019 UC Santa Barbara Alumni Award recipients. “It is truly a pleasure to honor these individuals who have done so much for UC Santa Barbara,” said George Thurlow, assistant vice chancellor and executive director of UC Santa Barbara Alumni, in a statement. “They demonstrate the support and generosity of our friends and alumni.”
Honorary alumnus Jeffrey C. Stewart, a professor of Black Studies and an affiliated professor in the Department of Education at UC Santa Barbara, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (2018). The book also received the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction, a 2018 Back Caucus of the American Library Association Award, a 2018 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers, the 2019 James A. Rawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the 2019 Mark Lynton History Prize, one of three awards given as part of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize administered by Harvard University’s Neiman Foundation for Journalism and the Columbia University School of Journalism.
A writer, curator and teacher of the history and culture of America, Stewart is a sought-after speaker with expertise in the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement of the 1920s and 30s. As part of his course on the history of jazz, he initiated the pop-up Jeffrey’s Jazz Coffeehouse that continues to invite local and national jazz musicians to perform in Isla Vista restaurants that he and colleagues from the campus’s art, sociology and dance departments transform for one evening into spaces for music and spoken word performances.