The Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture at Hamilton College addresses questions and issues of gender, diversity and social justice and provides college-wide opportunities for dynamic intellectual discussion, interaction and exchange.
Lawrence-Lightfoot, a sociologist in the Education School at Harvard University, studies the schools as social systems, the patterns and structures of classroom life, the relationships between adult developmental themes and teachers' work, and socialization within families, communities and schools.
Lawrence-Lightfoot is a prolific author of numerous articles, monographs and chapters. She has written six books: Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools (1978), Beyond Bias: Perspectives on Classrooms(1979, with Jean Carew), and The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture, which received the 1984 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. Her book, Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer (1988) won the 1988 Christopher Award, given for literary merit and humanitarian achievement. It was followed by I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation, and her latest book, The Art and Science of Portraiture (1997, with Jessica Hoffman Davis).
In 1984 she received the prestigious MacArthur Prize Award, and in 1993 she was awarded Harvard's George Ledlie Prize given for research that makes the most valuable contribution to science and the benefit of mankind. Lawrence-Lightfoot has been the recipient of 16 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. In 1993 the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair, an endowed professorship established at Swarthmore College, was named in her honor. In 1998 she was the recipient of the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair at Harvard University, which upon her retirement, will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Endowed Chair, making her the first African-American woman in Harvard's history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.
She did her undergraduate work at Swarthmore College, studied child development and teaching at Bank Street College of Education, and did her doctoral work in sociology of education at Harvard. She joined the Harvard faculty in 1972.
Lawrence-Lightfoot sits on numerous professional committees and boards of directors, including the National Academy of Education, the Boston Globe, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
