Dr. Sharon Harley will receive the 2022 Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College award in Indiana on May 6, 2022. The Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA) is one of the highest honors bestowed upon alumni of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. Since 2003, this award has been presented to the most prestigious alumni of SMWC for their professional achievements, contributions to society and support of the College. 

Sharon is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, who researches and teaches black women's labor history and racial and gender politics.  She has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as well as the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center, and the National Humanities Center at the Research Triangle, North Carolina.

Dr. Harley has delivered papers at professional history and women’s conferences in the U.S. as well as scholarly meetings in South Korea, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Ghana, South Africa, Abu Dhabi, and China. She was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service to write a historical study of the Historical Preservation of the Frederick Douglass Home. 
She chaired the U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service’s Mary McLeod Bethune Commission, and directed a Multicultural Teacher Training Institute for the superintendent of the Prince George's County Public Schools for over a decade.
Currently, she completed a historical monograph about the nexus of gender, labor, and citizenship in the post-emancipation U.S., working on a biography for the Yale University Press Black Lives Series, and serves as the Principal Investigator of a Mellon Foundation grant for an interdisciplinary “African/Black Diaspora Studies: Academic and Public Discourse” seminar.