Obama awards Rampersad a National Humanities Medal

Click the photo to view a video of the White House ceremony.

ARNOLD RAMPERSAD, the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, has been awarded a National Humanities Medal. The medals were presented by President Obama Wednesday during a White House ceremony. Rampersad, whose award-winning books have profiled W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson and Ralph Ellison, was cited for his work as a biographer and literary critic. The other humanities medalists for 2010 were authors Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and WENDELL E. BERRY, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford; historians Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood; literary scholars Daniel Aaron and Roberto González Echevarría; cultural historian Jacques Barzun; and legal historian and higher education policy expert Stanley Nider Katz. The full announcement is available on the National Endowment for the Humanities website.