Africana Studies
North Academic Building
85 Mission Park Drive
Williams College
Williamstown, MA 01267
Phone: (413) 597-2242
Fax: (413) 597-4222

Chair:
Prof. Shanti M. Singham
ssingham@williams.edu

Administrative Assistant:
Lucy Gardner Carson
Lucy.G.Carson@williams.edu

Lucy Gardner Carson ’85, aka the one-woman diaspora, enjoyed an adventurous, itinerant childhood as a faculty brat, then found an abiding feeling of home in southern Vermont, where her father, John Gardner, taught writing at Bennington College in the 1970s and her mother, Joan Gardner, taught orchestra and, later, English at Mt Anthony Union High School. She moved away to go to college, but was drawn back home to be closer to her mother and brother in Vermont after her father was killed in 1982. She attended Williams College for two years as a nontraditional student, holding down five different jobs to pay her own way, and graduated in 1985 with a B.A. in psychology. Then she wandered off with her musician-husband, John, had a successful kidney transplant, and eventually wound up on a sheep farm just south of Buffalo, New York, where she raised their two children, now teenagers, in a Waldorf school, and trained for Ski Patrol and played cello in her spare time. Lucy’s professional background includes working in bookstores and editing: after starting out as an in-house editor at Prometheus Books, she moved into freelance work for academic, corporate, and individual clients and served as managing editor of Schizophrenia Digest, a quarterly consumer health magazine. When her mother had a health crisis in the summer of 2006, Lucy leapt at the chance to come home for good. She accepted a job at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, heading up a print on demand and self-publishing program built around the revolutionary Espresso Book Machine (a new invention that produces high-quality perfect-bound paperback books from PDF files, in mere minutes). As challenging and fulfilling as that position was, however, she elected to leave the Northshire for a very pleasant and enjoyable position at her alma mater, working with and for fascinating and entertaining people, in a beautiful environment, for a good cause, right smack in the purple valley she has always loved—and best of all, now she can feed her family and have a little fun! As a Departmental Administrative Assistant in the Faculty Secretarial Office, Lucy supports the Africana Studies Program, the Latina/o Studies Program, and the Classics Department.