Brandt wins Grawemeyer, MLA awards

UW–Madison English Professor Deborah Brandt has won two major awards for a 2001 book she authored studying life, learning and literacy in Central Wisconsin.

Brandt won the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education for 2003 for “Literacy in American Lives”(Cambridge University Press), it was announced Friday.

For the same work, Brandt has been awarded the Modern Language Association‘s Mina P. Shaugnessy prize recognizing the outstanding research publication on the teaching of English.

The Grawemeyer Award comes with a $200,000 prize, while the MLA prize carries with it a $1,000 award.

“Brandt advocates literacy as a civil right,” says Allan Dittmer, professor in the department of teaching and learning at the University of Louisville and the coordinator for the Grawemeyer Award for Education. “No one else has said that as powerfully as she has. Literacy is an entitlement that everybody should have. We need to make that happen.”

Brandt’s book explains how generations of Americans have coped with increased pressure to improve their ability to read and write. As part of her research, she interviewed 80 Central Wisconsinites, ranging in age from 10 to 98 years old. The book offers a view of the economic and ideological conditions affecting the pursuit of literacy by people from all walks of life in the 20th century.

“The book is dedicated to the experiences of real people as they cope with fast-rising pressures on their skills of reading, writing and thinking,” says Brandt, who says she’s “honored and still stunned” by the recognition. “I would like to think that the Grawemeyer Award recognizes this principle of paying attention to people as a guide for language and literacy policies in this country.”

Brandt has been a UW–Madison faculty member since 1983, teaching graduate courses in literacy, writing studies, and qualitative research methods as well as several undergraduate writing courses. She is also a research affiliate with the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Rutgers University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. Her recent research focuses on social and economic histories of mass literacy and the changing status of writing within late twentieth and early twenty-first century American culture.

Brandt has received several teaching awards, including a University of Wisconsin Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, in 1993. She has served on executive committees of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy. She was a longtime tutor with the Madison Urban League’s Project Jamaa and is currently a member of the Education Committee on the Madison Branch of the NAACP. She is also co-chair of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Diversity Plan Oversight Committee.

The Grawemeyer awards are the first major international prizes to honor powerful ideas or creative works in the arts and sciences rather than personal achievements

The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities, promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The Mina P. Shaughnessy prize was established as a memorial to one of the most widely respected scholars and teachers in the field of writing.