Katharine Capshaw ’90, Ph.D., to Be Honored at Fall Honors Convocation
Students will be inducted into Epsilon Sigma Pi honor society during the event.
Katharine Capshaw, Ph.D., who received her bachelor’s degree in English from Manhattan College in 1990, will receive an honorary doctorate degree in humane letters at the College’s annual Fall Honors Convocation on Sunday, Oct. 15 at 3 p.m. At the event, students from its undergraduate schools will be inducted into the Epsilon Sigma Pi honor society, the oldest College-wide honor society on campus.
Capshaw is currently a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches courses in children's literature and African American literature. In addition, she has taught graduate classes and seminars on children’s literature and visual culture.
Both of Capshaw’s books, Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks and Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, have won several awards, including the Scholarly Book Award from the Children’s Literature Association. Capshaw has published more than two dozen articles on race and childhood, including pieces on Caribbean children’s literature and on African American anti-colonialist work for young people. Most recently, Capshaw co-edited Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature Before 1900.
The former editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Capshaw is on the board of several academic journals. She has lectured across the country and internationally, at events which included the first China-United States symposium on children’s literature. Capshaw is the president-elect of the Children’s Literature Association.