Bette J. Dickerson (PhD Washington State University) is a past Chair of AU’s Department of Sociology and a past Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.  She is a past President of the Association of Black Sociologists (ABS) and received the ABS A. Wade Smith Award for Teaching, Mentoring and Service. She is a member of the Sociologists for Women in Society’s Sister-to-Sister Task Force, a Chesapeake Regional Scholar in African American Studies of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia, and a trainee-researcher of the African American Aging Research Project of the University of Michigan’s Program for Research on Black Americans.

Professor Dickerson received Outstanding Professor of the Year Award from the Student Confederation, the Distinguished Faculty Award from the Multicultural Affairs and the International Student Services, and the Alice Paul Award from the Women’s Initiative & Women and Politics Institute. She is the faculty sponsor for AU’s Alternative Break: South Africa, served as co-principal investigator of its Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, and liaison to Project South:  Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. Dr. Dickerson is co-editor of the forthcoming special edition on “Intersectional/Analyses of the Family for the 21st Century” of the International Journal of Sociology of the Family.

She is currently conducting research as the U.S. member of a multi-nation comparative research project on family welfare policy sponsored by Okayama Prefectural University, Japan, and on elder African American women and sexuality for the Black and Latina/o Sexualities Project funded by the Ford Foundation. Her research interests include the socio-historical construction of race/ethnic and gender identities in the African Diaspora; collective memory and public history, Afrocentrism and Black Feminism/Womanism paradigms, and intersectional research methods and analyses.