The Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentor Award

2023 Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentor Award Recipient

The Caribbean Philosophical Association has selected Gertrude Gonzalez de Allen and Al-Yasha Williams as this year’s recipient of the Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentorship Award. It is an honor bestowed on an eminent scholar whose mentorship has cultivated an outstanding community of artists, scholars, teachers, or political activists in and beyond the academy.

The 2023 Hall award is shared this year because of the unusual collaborative work of the recipients. Dr. Gonzalez de Allen and Dr. Williams carry on Spelman College’s tradition of preparing students for the challenges of academe and other professions in which many have taken up leadership roles. Writing of their efforts and achievements, alumnae stated:

Dr. Allen… taught me the value of philosophy as an act of creativity. Dr. Allen positioned me to see philosophy as an art to make sense of the world rather than theorizing from the armchair.

Dr. Williams is a living example of theory and practice coming together. I remember working on a project for my UNCF Mellon-Mays fellowship about Black women’s anger, and she gave me this book about the topic that she remembered her mother having in the 1970s. I was so grateful for her willingness to pour into my work in such a tangible way. 

Dr. Allen and Dr. Williams continue to guide numbers of hard-hitting, quality, Black women thinkers into academia, into philosophy, and into the world in general. I am grateful to have been taught and mentored by them…. They have been outstanding mentors to me, and so many Spelmanites before me, and I believe that they will be wonderful mentors to future Spelmanites.

Dr. Kathryn Sophia Belle, an alumna of Spelman College, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn State, and Director of Penn State’s Africana Research Center, as well as founder of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers, wrote:

I enthusiastically support both Gertrude Gonzalez de Allen and Al-Yasha Williams for this award…. I have worked with both Gertrude and Al-Yasha, and I have seen their impact through the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers over the last 15 years, as well as through working with them in my own efforts to recruit from Spelman. Spelman has produced the highest number of Black women to go on to earn doctorates in philosophy of any other undergraduate institution in the US, and this has been made possible in large part (especially more recently) because of the work Gertrude and Al-Yasha have been doing there. They not only help to prepare Spelman students for graduate school, but they also continue to mentor and support students beyond their time at Spelman.

Nominations

Nominations for this award should be made by September 1st for consideration of receiving the award the succeeding year. The Committee will not consider self-nominations. The nomination should include a statement on the nominee’s contributions, influence, and a list of at least three students or mentees of the candidate. The Chairperson of the Awards Committee will then solicit letters from those students and prepare an overall dossier of the candidate’s achievements to present to the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. The Committee consists of all the laureates of the Frantz Fanon Award and Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Award, and as the number of awardees grows, the Stuart Hall Award. The nominations should be sent to CaribphilPrizes@gmail.com.

Stuart Hall Prize Previous Recipients