Vanessa Siddle Walker

Vanessa Siddle Walker, Professor of History of American Education and of Qualitative Research Methods at Emory University. She has written numerous articles and book chapters, including a series of manuscripts on the segregated schooling of African American children in the South that have appeared in the Harvard Educational Review, Review of Education Research, and the American Educational Research Journal. She has received the Raymond Cattell Early Career Award, the Best New Female Scholar Award from the Research Focus on Black Education, and the Best New Book Award from the History Division, all from AERA. She is also a recipient of the Young Scholars Award from the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools and is former National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Her most recent book, Race-ing Moral Formation: African American Perspectives on Care and Justice (co-edited with John Snarey), received the 2006 Outstanding Book Award from the Moral Development and Education AERA SIG. Her newest book, Hello Professor: The Professional Development and School Leadership of a Black Principal in the Segregated South, 1957-1968, is currently in press.

Professor Walker’s research focus on segregated schooling in the south.  Her work considers both portraits of individual school communities (Their Highest Potential, University of North Carolina Press) and, more recently, the network of educational activity that undergirded the development of these schools throughout the South. The latter results are reported in the American Educational Research Association Journal, the Review of Educational Research, and a book forthcoming (Principal Leaders, University of North Carolina Press).