2021 Women’s Studies Fellows Named

NEWS RELEASE
FOR RELEASE: Tuesday, March 30, 2021
CONTACT: Frances Hannan |hannan@woodrow.org | (201) 587-4755
Jeré Hogans | Program Officer | hogans@woodrow.org

Promising Scholars Join Program That Has Built Field Over Five Decades

PRINCETON, NJ (Tuesday, March 30, 2021)—Eight promising scholars have been named WW Dissertation Fellows in Women’s Studies for 2021 by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.

Fellows in the 2021 class are completing their dissertations and studies at some of the nation’s top institutions. They are working in departments such as Africana studies, anthropology, gender studies, history, and social psychology. Some of the dissertation topics include an exploration of the social and political lives of religious women of African descent in the nineteenth-century United States, an examination of the ways women cope with instances of police sexual violence, and an understanding of the politics of childbirth in Turkey.

Since 1974, the WW Women’s Studies Fellowship program has supported outstanding humanities and social science Ph.D. candidates whose work address women’s and gendered issues in interdisciplinary and original ways. Each Fellow receives a $5,000 stipend to use towards research-related expenses such as travel, data work or collection, supplies, and others.

These eight scholars join an international network of WW Women’s Studies Fellows who have become distinguished faculty members, artists and novelists, and leaders in business, government, and the nonprofit sector. They include a Pulitzer Prize winner, two MacArthur Fellows, numerous Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellows, and many others who have contributed greatly to their fields of study.

“The WW Women’s Studies Fellowship is an early vote of confidence for these scholars,” said Beverly Sanford, the Foundation’s Vice President. “Many of them are working in areas at the edges of their fields, or they’re studying women and groups who have been marginalized. It’s a privilege for us to be able to support this new, interdisciplinary work. Fellows from this program don’t just expand their own fields—for nearly half a century now, they’ve also helped build the field of women’s and gender studies across disciplines.”

This competitive Fellowship program remains the only national program of its kind. Over the course of its 47-year history, the WW Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship has named more than 600 Fellows. A number of these Fellows volunteer their time as reviewers to help select new Women’s Studies Fellows and enthusiastically support the next generation of scholars in their fields.

More information about the WW Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies can be found online at https://woodrow.org/fellowships/womens-studies/.

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About the Institute for Citizens & Scholars
The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (citizensandscholars.org) is a 75-year-old organization that has played a significant role in shaping higher education. Now, with an expanded mission Citizens & Scholars prepares leaders and engages networks of people and organizations to meet urgent education challenges. The overarching goal is to shape an informed, productively engaged, and hopeful citizenry. 

2021 WW DISSERTATION FELLOWS IN WOMEN’S STUDIES

Andréa Becker • Graduate Center, CUNY, sociology
“I Just Wanted It Gone”:  Examining “Wanted” Hysterectomies through Two Gendered Case Studies

Priscilla Bustamante • Graduate Center, CUNY, critical social psychology
Sexual Misconduct in Everyday Policing: Experiences of and Resistance to State-Sanctioned Sexual Violence in New York City 

Emily Jeannine Clark • Johns Hopkins University, history of medicine
Laboring Bodies: Dispossessed Women and Reproduction in Colonial New England

Jaimie Crumley • University of California–Los Angeles, gender studies
Tried as by Fire: African American Women’s Abolitionist Theologies, 1789–1880

Ferhan Guloglu • George Washington University, anthropology
Cultivating Motherhood: The (Re)configuration of Natural Childbirth in Turkey

Svetlana Ter-Grigoryan • Ohio State University, history
“There is No Sex in the USSR”: Sex, Soviet Identity, and Glasnost, 1986–1991

Caroline Tracey • University of California–Berkeley, geography
Binational Politics at Intimate Scales: The Activism of Women and Trans Deportees and Return Migrants in Mexico City

Melanie White • Brown University, Africana studies
“What Dem Do To We No Have Name”: Intimate Violence, Autonomy, and Black Women’s Contemporary Art in Caribbean Nicaragua