Funding Opportunities for CSW Research Scholars

Elline Lipkin

Julie C. Nack Ngue

Disability in Contemporary Senegalese Women's Writing:
Towards a New Aesthetics of the Global

As part of her larger project, Critical Conditions: Refiguring Bodies of Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Writing, Julie Nack Ngue analyzes Senegalese writer Ken Bugul's novel La Folie et la Mort (2000). The novel presents a chilling portrait of a contemporary African nation under the rule of a brutal tyrant as well as the disjunctive forces of globalization. Bugul's novel poses a crucial question: what becomes of those women whose bodies, psyches, and speech do not satisfy the requirements of national health and economic order? Health and the body, Bugul reveals, are subject to myriad cultural, national, and global imperatives which marginalize or quite literally efface from view those bodies deemed unruly or grotesque. Ultimately, the novel implores us to recognize a more inclusive portrait of postcoloniality; or rather, a new aesthetic of postcoloniality—one that does not idealize healing, whole bodies and conclusive, happy endings to the detriment of a dedicated, concerned examination of the historical circumstances and the material realities of postcolonial life.

Karina Eileraas

“Just Like You”, But Not Like Us:
Visualizing Multiracial Femininity and National Belonging in the American Girl Family 

Since their introduction in 1985, American Girl dolls have evolved into a national phenomenon. The company’s latest product line, "Just Like You", consists of 24 customized dolls identified not by name, but instead by a unique number and "inventory" of hair, skin, and eye color. Their display disturbingly evokes the "racial types" and “comparative racial scales” that were popularized within colonial and eugenics discourse of the early 20th century. In this project Eileraas asks how we might read American Girl’s visual formulation of multiracial identity in relation to racial classification efforts that authorized the one-drop law and the American eugenics movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, and with respect to historical fears about racial mixing, indeterminacy, and degeneration that have plagued the American legal, literary, scientific, and cultural imagination.  Eileraas also considers how American Girl formulates national identity and normative citizenship alongside specific (in)visibilities of race, femininity, and  multiethnic identity.

Becky Nicolaides

Into the Suburban Fold: A Social History of Postwar Suburban America

This project is concerned, fundamentally, with the relationship between community and the built environment of suburbia since 1945. In recent years, a spate of studies has suggested that social capital has been in decline in America, at least since the 1970s. Suburban sprawl is often implicated in this decline. While most of these works have been done by political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, historians have largely avoided this scholarly debate. Nicolaides' goal with this project is not only to enter this discourse, but to bring to it a historical perspective and an appreciation for the great diversity of suburban experiences since 1945.

Ernestina Osorio

Women's Transnational Promotion of Mexican Modernism

Ernestina Osorio's research project focuses on women's transnational, media-based promotion of modern Mexican architecture. The purpose of this work is to advance knowledge and understanding of women's roles in an international mid-twentieth century architectural discourse.