July 30, 2009
William Carter. Download image.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Distinguished Professor Emeritus William C. Carter, Ph.D., is the winner of the 2009 Alabama Humanities Award. The award will be presented at the Alabama Humanities Awards Luncheon at noon Monday, Sept. 14 in the Wynfrey Hotel.
The luncheon, which will celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Alabama Humanities Foundation (AHF), will honor Carter, an author and renowned expert on the French writer Marcel Proust.
Carter, who chaired the AHF Board for two terms, was instrumental in developing UAB Mervyn H. Sterne Library's Proust collection, now the third-largest in the world, and he co-produced the award-winning documentary "Marcel Proust: A Writer's Life," which aired on PBS in 1993.
Carter's book Marcel Proust: A Life, the first comprehensive English-language biography on Proust, was published in 2000. It received critical acclaim and was listed as a Notable Book of 2000 by The New York Times, one of the Best Biographies of 2000 by the London Sunday Times and among the Best Books of 2000 by the Los Angeles Times. His 2006 Proust in Love was called a "marvelous study of the comic splendor of the great novelist's vision of human eros and its discontents" by literary critic Harold Bloom.
The French government honored Carter for his contributions to French culture by awarding him the Palmes Académiques in 1989. In 1992 he won the Prix Servir du Rotary International, an annual award given to Americans who have made outstanding contributions to Franco-American cultural exchanges.
Carter is a native of Jesup, Ga. He completed his bachelor's degree in French at the University of Georgia in 1963. In 1965, he won a one-year Fulbright-Hays Grant to study in France at the University of Strasbourg. Afterward, he returned to the University of Georgia and earned a master's degree in French in 1967. In 1971, he earned his doctorate in French from Indiana University. He joined the UAB Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in 1975 and served as department chairman from 1979 to1990.
Carter won the 2002 UAB Caroline and Charles W. Ireland Prize for Scholarly Distinction, and he was named as a Distinguished Professor of French at UAB in 2004. Carter retired from UAB in 2008. In June 2009, the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees named him a Distinguished Professor Emeritus.
About the UAB Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
The UAB Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures offers a full range of language, culture, literature and civilization courses that are designed to meet the diverse global challenges facing today's students.
About the Alabama Humanities Foundation
The Alabama Humanities Foundation is a nonprofit organization funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (of which AHF is the state affiliate), as well as by corporate and individual donors. AHF is dedicated to the promotion and celebration of the humanities throughout the state of Alabama and, to that end, conducts its own statewide programs and awards grants, on a competitive basis, to nonprofit organizations for humanities projects.