Dr. Caroline Sawyer Receives Akers Award from South Carolina Humanities
Dr. Caroline Sawyer South Carolina Humanities is pleased to announce USCB's Dr. Caroline Sawyer is a 2024 recipient of the Governor’s Awards in the Humanities and the Akers Prize.
The Akers Prize, formerly the Fresh Voices in the Humanities Award, recognizes innovative individuals who use culture and history to bring people together, but whose efforts may have gone relatively unnoticed beyond their own community.
Sawyer is an award-winning producer and associate professor of Communication Studies at USCB. The other Akers Prize winner this year is George Wingard, filmmaker and program coordinator for the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program.
Sawyer is the director of the Sand Shark Center for Innovative Media at USCB. She earned her PhD in communication from the University of Memphis, her Master of Arts from Austin Peay State University, and her Bachelor of Business Administration from Baylor University. Her teaching experience includes working at several universities in Tennessee and California before coming to USCB. In addition to her educational background, she worked professionally as a corporate communication consultant for several public and private corporations advising on media production, website design, social media campaigns, and public & investor relations.
In and out of the classroom, Sawyer embraces experiential learning or learning by doing . She is a hands-on instructor. Her courses consist of learning theory and applying that theory to practical projects that help students build skills and their resume.
One such opportunity is the TV show Sawyer produces, By The River. The program is a partnership between USCB and SCETV and is distributed nationally via American Public Television. USCB students work as production assistants on the show. By the River has received 11 national awards, three international awards, and one Southeast Emmy nomination.
At USCB, Sawyer supervises student media productions including some of the university's athletic livestream broadcasts. She also works on collaborative community media projects through the Sand Shark Center for Innovative Media, including providing significant support to the Mather School Museum & Interpretive Center in Beaufort
This work has included producing a short documentary about the Mather School, successfully writing $24,320 in grants for the museum to help provide programming, including digital media workshops for the community, matching students with the museum for internships and special projects such as social media campaigns, setting up a podcasting station in the museum so that Matherites (Mather School alumni) could record their story, and working with Dr. Mac James to develop a virtual walking tour of the school's historic campus. The audio version of this tour is currently being used by the Reconstruction Era National Park on their app featuring the Mather School.
- USCB -
8/8/2024