Dr. Carolyn Medine Honored at Annual Faculty Reception

13 September, 2024 - Dr. Carolyn Medine was honored with the 2024 Women's Studies Faculty Award. This award is presented each year to a faculty member whose scholarship, mentoring, and leadership has notably enriched the academic culture at UGA and beyond. Dr. Medine accepted the award at the annual Fall Faculty Reception, where new and old faculty members are welcomed to make new friends and reconnect with old ones in a convivial atmosphere at the beginning of the academic year. Faculty, grad students, and staff from across the university gathered at the Special Collections Library events room for conversation, food and drink, and updates from the Institute for Women's Studies, which hosts the event each year. After welcome statements from IWS Director Dr. Patricia Richards and Senior Associate Dean Paula Lemons, Medine was introduced by Dr. Cecilia Herles, who noted Medine's rich history at UGA in her home department of Religion as well as her affiliations with the Institute of African American Studies (where she serves as Director) and the Institute for Women's Studies (where she is an affiliate faculty member). In accepting the award, Medine noted the ongoing importance of interdisciplinary, intersectional scholarship, and closed with a poem from Alice Walker, on whom Medine has regularly written:

Before I Leave the Stage, by Alice Walker

Before I leave the stage
I will sing the only song
I was meant truly to sing.

It is the song
of I AM.
Yes: I am Me
&
You.
WE ARE.

I love Us with every drop
of our blood
every atom of our cells
our waving particles
-undaunted flags of our Being-
neither here nor there.