About the Award
The Farrar Award is presented in honor of Ronald and Gayla Farrar. Dr. Farrar is professor emeritus of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Recipients of the award receive a plaque and a $1,000 prize, and present a lecture on their research at the biennial Media and Civil Rights History Symposium.
2017 Farrar Award Recipient
R. Joseph Parrott, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, is the 2017 recipient of the Farrar Award for his article published in the July–September 2015 issue of Race & Class: “A Luta Continua: Radical Filmmaking, Pan-African Liberation and Communal Empowerment.”
The contest judges, a national panel of three historians with expertise in civil rights
and media history, selected Dr. Parrott’s article as the award winner from the largest
field of submissions in the Farrar Award’s five competitions.
Dr. Parrott delivered the Farrar Award Lecture at the Media and Civil Rights History
Symposium sponsored by the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University
of South Carolina on Saturday, April 1. He also received a plaque and the $1,000 prize
in a presentation from Bradley Farrar, son of Ron and the late Gayla Farrar.
Parrott completed his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, having held graduate fellowships with International Security Studies at Yale University, the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, “Struggle for Solidarity: The New Left, African Decolonization, and the End of the Cold War Consensus,” is a broad transnational history that considers Portuguese decolonization in Africa as a noteworthy component in transforming western engagement with the global south.
Parrott’s work cuts across intellectual, diplomatic, and socio-political history to illuminate how questions of race and empire drove the policy choices of U.S. leaders, African nationalists, and Portuguese officials, as well as the agenda of a wider western Left.
The Farrar Award judges were Drs. Patricia Sullivan (University of South Carolina), Phillip Jeter (Winston-Salem State University), and Bobby Donaldson (University of South Carolina).
See previous recipients of the award.
Watch for details on the call for nominations for the 2019 Farrar Award in Media & Civil Rights History.
Kenneth Campbell
Media & Civil Rights History Symposium
School of Journalism and Mass Communications
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
Email: kcampbell@sc.edu