Katherine Beckett succeeds Professor Emeritus Stewart Tolnay as the S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology.
The S. Frank Miyamoto Professorship in Sociology was endowed in 2002 in honor of Frank Miyamoto, former professor and chair of the University of Washington Department of Sociology. Frank began his long association with the University of Washington as an undergraduate in the 1930s. During his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, he returned to the UW as an instructor, a position abruptly terminated by the wartime evacuation of persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast region. Dorothy Swaine Thomas invited Frank to join her Evacuation and Resettlement Study, based at UC Berkeley, and he spent the war years studying the Japanese minority who were uprooted by the evacuation. He used these materials to complete his PhD at Chicago in 1950. Frank returned to UW as professor of Sociology. He chaired the Department from 1965-1970, and was associate dean of Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences from 1975-1980. His teaching and research focused on social psychology, collective behavior, and race and ethnic relations. The endowment that bears his name is preferentially awarded to an outstanding professor of Sociology who has achieved national recognition and has made significant contributions to both research and teaching, and the endowment supports the advancement of research focusing on Professor Miyamoto’s areas of interest.