History Professor Receives Excellence in Scholarship Award!

June 7, 2021
Steve Estes posing with a surf board

Dr Steve Estes, History professor and department chair, is the recipient of the 2020-2021 Excellence in Research Scholarship and/or Creative Activity Award! 

Dr. Estes' research interests focus primarily on southern history and civil rights, and he is a prolific author. He has written three books: I Am a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2005), Ask & Tell: Gay & Lesbian Veterans Speak Out (2007), and Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South After the Civil Rights Movement (2015). He is currently finishing his fourth book Rebel Swell: Surfing Across the South (forthcoming in 2022). His next research project will focus on the ways in which San Francisco shaped the Beat Generation. He's using a School of Social Science summer stipend to travel to Stanford to look at the Allen Ginsberg Papers.

In the announcement of the award, Dr. Estes was cited for exemplifying the teacher-scholar model of faculty work. In spring 2021, worked with several student activists in the School of Social Sciences on an oral history project to document the Black Lives Matter movement in Sonoma County. This project was supported by the Koret Foundation and the McNair Scholars Program. During the course of this project, the students interviewed fourteen activists and two law enforcement officers to get different perspectives on local struggles for social justice and criminal justice reforms. These interviews will ultimately be housed in Sonoma State's archives to inform future generations of students and scholars about the history of race and policing in Sonoma County. Next year, a McNair Scholar will be doing research in the digital archives of the San Francisco Chronicle as part of Dr. Estes' new research project on the Beat Generation.

Congratulations Dr. Estes!

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