William E. Williams has been named Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities.
William Earl Williams, Professor of Fine Arts and Curator of Photography at Haverford College, has been awarded the Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professorship in the Humanities.
The chair was established in 1983 by Haverford alumnus John L. Dusseau '34 in honor of his first wife, Audrey, who predeceased him in 1979; the couple shared a commitment to writing and learning about the people and cultures of the world. Dusseau spent most of his professional career with the W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia publishers of medical books and journals. From 1950 until his retirement in 1977, he served as Vice President and Editor-in-Chief. He has published two books of his own: An Informal History of W.B. Saunders Company, on the Occasion of its Hundredth Anniversary (1988) and Bugaboos, Chimeras & Achilles' Heels: 10,001 Difficult Words and How to Use Them (1993). After his retirement, he continued writing on topics in medicine and science for a variety of publications and journals, including the Haverford alumni magazine. He died on January 9, 1999.
“This announcement was a complete surprise, and the magnitude of this honor has not yet sunk in,” says Williams.“This honor comes at a crucial time in my own research as I begin to study the culture of slavery in the Lesser Antilles where it was first introduced into the New World, and the ultimate protest against slavery by the travelers and supporters of the Underground Railroad with its terminus in Canada.” Williams will use the Dusseau Professorship's accompanying research stipend to travel to Canada and the Lesser Antilles, hoping to enlarge the scope of his pictorial representation of slave culture.
Williams has been affiliated with Haverford since 1978, after receiving his M.F.A. in photography that year from Yale University School of Art. His photographs have been widely exhibited, including group and solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Smith College and the Smithsonian, and can be found in many public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Baltimore Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum and the Smithsonian. He has organized more than 70 exhibitions in 25 years, including work by Lewis Hine, Diane Arbus, James Van Der Zee, Paul Strand and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Williams has received individual artist fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 1986, 1997 and 2003, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1997 and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. He served as a member of the national board of the Society for Photographic Education from 1997-2003 and as past member of its executive committee.
In his years at Haverford, Williams has been“ever productive, solo champion of a program in need of support and care,” according to Provost Linda Bell.“He has mentored countless students in photography and sent many of our best well prepared and forward bound to pursue careers in photography of their own. He has always, in process, not narrowed ambition to training practitioners, but to cultivating intellectual and curricular connections to the whole art of photography.”
