Funding Opportunities for Graduate Students

Amount

One $1,000 award.

Criteria

The student must submit a completed UCLA PhD dissertation on women and/or gender which makes use of historical materials and methods. If planning to file a doctoral dissertation by June 2, 2008, applicant is eligible pending verification of filing status.

To apply

The application must contain the following materials in hard copy only:

Three copies of each:

• Mary Wollstonecraft Dissertation Award Cover Sheet
• Dissertation Abstract (1 page)
• Completed Dissertation
• Curriculum Vitae
• Transcript (unofficial copy is acceptable)

One copy of:

• Letters of recommendation from two faculty members (one of which must be
  from the candidate's chair, usually the nominating faculty member).
  The letters should be sealed in an envelope with the recommender’s signature
  across the back flap.

Deadline

5:30 PM
Thursday, May 7, 2009

Deirdre Cooper Owens

Deirdre Cooper Owens received her Ph.D. in History in May of 2008. She will be housed as a 2008-09 Carter G. Woodson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia this fall. The following year, Deirdre will join the faculty of the University of Mississippi as an Assistant Professor of History. Her dissertation, “'Courageous Negro Servitors' and Laboring Irish Bodies: An Examination of Antebellum-Era Modern American Gynecology” offers a rare glimpse into the lives of enslaved and poor Irish-immigrant women whose bodies were used to help pioneer modern gynecology. Her dissertation locates the nexus that linked race and ignominy between these groups of “degraded” women. Simultaneously, Deirdre’s study elucidates how their racialized bodies became equalized on operating tables. One of the great ironies of the experimental sexual surgeries performed on enslaved and poor Irish-immigrant women, was the undeniable fact that doctors and surgeons knew that these women’s so-called imperfect bodies were perfect anatomical exemplars to repair disorders and create soundness for “normal” white women. Deirdre asserts that without the institution of slavery and the large influx of European immigrants entering America, professionalized women’s healthcare and medical technology would not have developed as rapidly during the 1800s.

Kristen Hatch

Kristen Hatch received her Ph.D. in Film and Television in the fall of 2006. This fall she will take a position as Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies department at UC Irvine. In Hatch’s dissertation, “Playing Innocent: Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood, 1850–1939,” she notes that many scholars and critics have seen something perverse in Shirley Temple’s star persona. On and off the screen, adult men went into raptures over her, and in her earliest roles she played prostitutes and showgirls. Hatch argues that these and other elements developed out of nineteenth-century performance traditions that were celebrated for their ability to tame adult male sexuality, and the shift from understanding girls’ performances to be disciplinary to identifying them as pedophilic actually points to a significant shift in the definition of childhood innocence.

Jennifer Jung-Kim

Jennifer Jung-Kim received her Ph.D. in 2005. Her dissertation, “Gender and Modernity in Colonial Korea,” examines the centrality of gender identities to the modernization project in Korea during the period of Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945.