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Senior Fellows Program

The Senior Fellows Program convenes a small interdisciplinary group of retired emeritus Stanford faculty who maintain interest in the study of race and ethnicity and whose talents and expertise can be of great use to the Research Institute. This program has at least two unique benefits. The breadth of knowledge and experience accumulated by emeritus faculty over decades of active scholarship is crucial to the mentoring of younger faculty and graduate students who may be working within the conventions of their chosen discipline, but have interests in topics that may not be fully accessible within the usual paradigms and methodologies of a single academic field. In addition, activities and events like the Research Institute’s Faculty Seminar Series, faculty research networks and monthly Fellows Forum meetings provide emeriti scholars with an intellectual home.

Application Information

Senior Fellows:
Current Fellows
Fellows Emeriti

Application Information

The Senior Fellows Program will convene a small group of Stanford emeritus faculty who are retired from their full-time academic appointments and who maintain interest in the study of race, ethnicity, and culture. A stipend of up to $5,000 per year is available.

Candidates for the Seniors Fellows Program should submit:

Curriculum vitae
One-page description of your research project
A letter of reference
The name of a second reference

*Materials must be submitted by February 16th, 2007 to:

Dorothy M. Steele, Ed.D, Executive Director of CCSRE
Stanford University
Main Quad, Building 240
Stanford, CA 94305-2152

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Current Fellows

Senior Fellows 2003 - 2004

George M. Fredrickson, Professor Emeritus of History and Co-Director Emeritus of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University

George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History (emeritus) at Stanford University and Co-director (emeritus) of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1956 and 64, respectively, matriculated as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oslo (1956-7) and was awarded an honorary M.A. from Oxford University in 1988. Before coming to Stanford in 1984, he taught at Harvard and at Northwestern, where he was William Smith Mason Professor of American History. He is the author of seven original books, all of which are currently in print: The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965), The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971, co-winner of the Anisfield wolf Award in Race Relations), White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (1981, Pulitzer Prize finalist, winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from Phi Beta Kappa and the Merle Curti Award for social history from the Organization of American Historians), The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality, (1987), Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (1995), The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (1997), and Racism: A Short History (2002). In addition, he has edited four books, published numerous articles in general as well as scholarly journals, including more than twenty-five pieces in The New York Review of Books. In 1985, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Fellows Emeriti

Senior Fellows 2002 - 2003

David B. Abernethy, Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Stanford University

David Abernethy has been a member of the Political Science Department at Stanford since 1965. He studies past and present relations between the world's poor, relatively powerless areas and its wealthy, powerful countries. He has taught courses on politics in tropical Africa, the politics of race in southern Africa, colonialism and nationalism in the Third World, theories of imperialism, and controversies over foreign aid. Professor Abernethy authored The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980 (Yale University Press, 2000). He twice received the H&S Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2002-03 he received the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for contributions to undergraduate education and the Richard W. Lyman Award for service to the University's alumni/ae.
Professor Abernethy has concentrated his studies of race and ethnic relations on sub-Saharan Africa, with particular attention to South Africa (race) and Nigeria (ethnicity). This coming January he will be the faculty lecturer for a Stanford Alumni Association Travel-Study group to New Zealand. In preparation for that trip he is examining the history of relations between that country's indigenous Maori population and settlers from the British Isles who, from the 19th century onward, have controlled the country's political and economic life. His work as a RICSRE Fellow will center on the comparative analysis of race relations in settler societies.

Harumi Befu, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Stanford University

Harumi Befu joined the faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University in 1965 and remained there for the next thirty years. The year he retired from Stanford Befu became Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute for Cultural and Human Research at Kyoto Bunkyo University in Japan. Professor Befu retired from Kyoto Bunkyo University in 2000. His primary scholarly interest continues to be Japan, where he lived as a youth and has carried out a number of research projects. He is the author of Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron (Trans Pacific Press, 2001) and co-editor of Globalizing Japan: Ethnography of the Japanese presence in Asia, Europe, and America (Routledge 2001). During his year as a RICSRE Senior Fellow Professor Befu plans to explore ethnicity, minority issues, and racism in Japan compared with the U.

Senior Fellows 2001-2002

Lucius J. Barker, William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Stanford University

Lucius J. Barker is the former Chair of the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his BA from Southern University-Baton Rouge in 1949, and his MA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1950 and 1954, respectively. Professor Barker served on the faculties at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1956-1967), University of Illinois (1967 to 1969), Washington University (1969 – 1990), and Stanford since 1990. His major teaching and research interests are in Judicial Politics and Constitutional Law, and African-American Politics. He has written a number of articles and books including co-authorship of two widely used college texts--Civil Liberties and the Constitution (1999) and African Americans and the Political System (1998). Professor Barker plans to carry on an active career in research and writing, to finish up several projects, including a major collaborative biographical study of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall. In addition, he plans to write an autobiographical family history.

James Lowell Gibbs, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Stanford University

Professor Gibbs joined the Stanford Faculty in anthropology in 1966, after teaching six years at the University of Minnesota. He graduated from Cornell in 1952 with a BA degree, studied at the University of Cambridge for a year and then went onto Harvard, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1961. Although he retired in 1997, he gives guest lectures in Stanford courses and works with students on individual projects. His main interests are in the anthropology of film, African legal systems, African ethnology, and psychological anthropology. In fieldwork, he has researched traditional law and conflict resolution among the Kpelle of Liberia and in Botswana. Professor Gibbs is the editor of, and contributor to Peoples of Africa (1965) and co-author of Law in Radically Different Cultures (1983), a study of law in Botswana, Egypt, China, and the United States. His articles on Kpelle law, film and television, and issues in higher education appear in journals and several symposia. He is co-producer and co-director of the prize-winning documentary film, “The Cows of Dolo Ken Paye” and his most recent writing (1999) is on diversity in television and on the portrayal of race boundaries in feature films.

P. Herbert Leiderman, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Emeritus at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Dr. Leiderman’s education began in 1941 at the University of Michigan as a major in physics. His time at Michigan was interrupted in 1942 by service in the Army Air Corps where he trained in Meteorology. After discharge from service he continued his education at the University of Chicago, receiving an MA degree in psychology in 1949.
Dr. Leiderman’s professional education in medicine was at the Harvard Medical School, where he received a MD degree, with honors, in 1953. He continued post graduate training in neurology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in Boston, and was appointed an instructor in psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School from 1958 to 1963. Dr. Leiderman came to Stanford University in 1963 as an Associate Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and was promoted to Professor in 1969; he remained at Stanford until retirement in 1989. He currently serves as a consultant to the Director at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and to the California Youth Authority at Stockton where he consults with the staff on problem youth. Dr. Leiderman is interested in studying how social and cultural factors interact with personal qualities to impede or promote the transition from adolescence to adulthood.