Professor Clarence Jefferson Hall, Jr. received the 2021 Feliks Gross Award for Excellence in Faculty Research and Scholarship
Professor Clarence Jefferson Hall, Jr., Assistant Professor, History, received the 2021 Feliks Gross Award for excellence in faculty research and scholarship.
Hall was among four CUNY faculty and the only community college professor to receive the Feliks Gross award that year—the pandemic delayed the plaque and honorarium.
Hall received his award not long after the publication of his first book, A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York’s North Country.
In addition to teaching and mentoring students, Hall is particularly interested in initiatives and projects related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and in 2020 founded a first-of-its-kind Faculty and Staff Association for LGBTQ Faculty and Staff at Queensborough.
Recently, Hall participated in an event hosted by the Correctional Association of New York.
The organization hosting the event is the state’s oldest prison reform group. Founded in 1844, it is the only independent organization empowered by the state legislature to inspect and monitor conditions inside New York’s prisons.
Hall said, “As part of the research for A Prison in the Woods, I studied the Association’s earliest annual reports, from the 1840s through the 1860s. I never imagined that I might one day be working with the same organization whose work more than 150 years ago spurred my interest in the history of criminal justice.”
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