Antioch University’s Ph.D. in Leadership and Change Program Welcomes New Faculty Member
Posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Antioch University’s Ph.D. in Leadership and Change Program is proud to announce the appointment of Dr. Stewart Burns as Professor of Community Leadership. Dr. Burns brings to the Program many years of researching, teaching, mentoring, and practicing leadership, focusing on social movements, community organizing, and other forms of grassroots democracy.
A social and political historian with an interdisciplinary orientation, Dr. Burns has published notable histories of U.S. social movements and the civil rights movement, including the third volume of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers, Birth of a New Age (lead editor); the first history of the Montgomery bus boycott, Daybreak of Freedom (made into an award-winning HBO feature film, Boycott in 2001, on which he consulted); and a biography of King, To the Mountaintop, winner of the Wilbur Award for excellence in communicating religious ideas and themes to a secular audience. Social Movements of the 1960s (first published 1990), has been widely assigned in U.S. history and sociology courses for two decades (still in print).
After earning his Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, he taught history and leadership studies at Stanford and at Williams College. Dr. Burns also directs the Center for Community Engagement (CCE) at Williams, which prepares students in leadership skills through community development and social justice work, locally, nationally, and globally. Dr. Burns’s scholarship has been shaped by his grassroots leadership experience. Over the years he has worked as a community organizer in diverse contexts. In particular, he helped organize the draft resistance movement in the San Francisco Bay Area (1969-71) and taught at the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Palo Alto.
Later he served as an organizer for the United Farm Workers, for environmental reform, for the safe energy movement (late 1970s), and for the nuclear disarmament campaign (1980s). During his decade at Stanford University, he was a key player in multicultural advances involving curriculum, student programs, and efforts at interracial communication and reconciliation. In 1997-98 he founded and directed the campus-wide Stanford Dialogue on Race.
Since his return to New England seven years ago he has been nurturing civic engagement and public leadership by Williams students and community members. As a member of the Ph.D. in Leadership and Change Program learning community Dr. Burns aims to help to strengthen community-based leadership (nationally and globally) and hopes to contribute to a renaissance of leadership education and civic commitment among people of all ages and backgrounds.
