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| Professor
Floyd W. Matson- passed away April 7, 2008 |
Floyd
Matson, Professor of American Studies, taught and wrote in a variety
of fields including cultural history, social thought and humanistic
psychology; film, popular culture and media studies; and civil rights
issues related to disability and diversity. He taught and lectured
widely in Europe and Southeast Asia, as well as across the U.S.
and Canada, and his books have been variously published in five
languages.
Among
the books of which he authored or co-authored were Prejudice,
War, and the Constitution: Causes and Consequences of the Evacuation
of the Japanese Americans in World War II (winner of the Woodrow
Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association for "the
best book on government and democracy"); The Broken Image
(selected for The American Quarterly’s roster of 100
key books in American Studies); The Idea of Man (a selection
of the Science Book Club); The Human Connection; and The
Dehumanization of Man.
Professor
Matson, while not blind himself, published widely in the fields
of blindness and disability studies, notably as author of a history
of the organized blind movement in America, Walking Alone and
Marching Together, and as a co-author of Hope Deferred: Social
Welfare and the Blind. He authored a biography of the blind
constitutional scholar and activist, Jacobus tenBroek entitled Blind
Justice: Jacobus tenBroek and the Vision of Equality, whose
scholarship changed the course of civil rights in the twentieth
century while his leadership transformed the lives of a discarded
minority.
Professor
Matson edited a number of books including The Human Dialogue;
Voices of Crisis; Being, Becoming, and Behavior; and Without/Within:
Humanism and Behaviorism. His articles appeared in such scholarly
journals as The Political Science Quarterly; The Journal
of the History of Ideas; The Journal of Politics;
The South Atlantic Quarterly, and The Journal of Humanistic
Psychology.
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