The Center for the Study of Women in Society has announced 2021-22 funding awards totaling $108,000 for scholarship, research and creative work on women and gender, the center’s largest funding year in well over a decade.

Since the pandemic has interrupted the center’s regular programming, the center decided instead to increase this year’s grant funding to support faculty and graduate student research. A total of 26 grants were awarded to 16 graduate students, nine tenure-track faculty members, and one career faculty member.

In graduate student research awards, Jon Jaramillo, a doctoral candidate in romance languages, was selected as the next Jane Grant Dissertation Award holder for his project “Viral Bodies: AIDS and Other Contagions in Latin American Narrative.” The Jane Grant dissertation awardee receives an $18,000 stipend and UO student health insurance for the academic year. In addition, in partnership with the dean, the Graduate School provides tuition remission for the academic year.

According to Jaramillo’s project abstract, “The HIV/AIDS crisis in Latin America was overshadowed by the late phase of the Cold War, while authoritarian governments promoted discourses reflecting moral and ethical exceptionalism. People with AIDS (PWAs) experienced multiple crises—moral excision by the state, marginalization, and the certainty of death …. Exceptional conditions led to a 10-year delay before works by Latin American artists and writers emerged. My dissertation  … examines works by Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), Mario Bellatín (Mexico), Pedro Lemebel (Chile), and Pablo Perez (Argentina) since they reveal a spectrum of intersectional AIDS subjectivities exhibiting accommodation, resistance, and transgression of prevailing national and religious norms.”

The center has awarded the Jane Grant Fellowship to graduate students at the University of Oregon since 1983. The highly competitive dissertation award supports projects from a range of disciplines on topics related to women and gender. The award is open to eligible UO graduate students who are are at the “all but dissertation” stage and spend the award year writing their dissertation.

In addition, a new Graduate Writing Completion Fellowship gives summer writing support to one or more doctoral students who are in the early stages of their dissertation and who were runners-up for the Jane Grant Fellowship. This year, two completion fellowships were awarded to doctoral candidate Robin Okumu in comparative literature and doctoral candidate Cornesha Tweede in romance languages.

The following is a complete list of grant awardees and their projects:

Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship

• Jon Jaramillo, romance languages, “Viral Bodies: AIDS and Other Contagions in Latin American Narrative.”

Graduate Writing Completion Fellowship

• Robin Okumu, comparative literature, “Utopian Relationality: Intercorporeal Subjectivity in French Feminist Fiction.”
• Cornesha Tweede, romance languages, “The Recuperation of Agency and Subjectivity of the Black African Women in the Iberian Early Modern Archive.”

Graduate student research grants

• Ola Adeniji, human physiology, “Biomedical Sports Analysis in Collegiate Athletics: Determinants of Performance in Sprint and Jump Events among Female Participants”
• Elinam Amevor, journalism and communication, “Risking Birth: Gender, Culture and Advocacy in Maternal Healthcare Choices and Utilization in Ghana.”
• Malvya Chintakindi, anthropology, “Informal Labor Blues: Effects of COVID-19 on Dalit Caste Women in Hyderabad, India.”
• Anna Dulba-Barnett, theater arts, “Reading Polish Theater Through the Lens of Eco-Dramaturgy and Eco-Feminism.”
• Cassandra Galentine, English, “Wash Yourself White: Race, Hygiene, and Environmental Justice in U.S. Multiethnic Women’s Working Class Literature.”
• Teresa Hernandez-Reed, English, “Contested Motherlands: Disputed Sovereignties and Geographies of the U.S./Mexico Border”
• Sarah Horn, psychology, “Mental and Physical Health Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Child Welfare Involved Women Caregivers.”
• Carla Macal, geography “GuateMaya Migrant Women in Los Angeles: Healing Inter-generational Trauma in the Diaspora.”
• Nathan Mather, counseling psychology, “Working Class Gay Fathers’ Experience with Unpaid Care Work: A Narrative Inquiry”
• Zeinab Nobowati, philosophy, “Is Postcolonial Becoming Postfeminist? A Feminist Philosophical Inquiry.”
• Annalee Ring, philosophy, “Cleanliness: A Cultural Construction Perpetuating Race, Gender, and Class Discriminations.”
• Max Skorodinsky, cducation, “More than Binary, More than Normative, More than Quantities: Diverse Gender Identities in Computer Science Education Research.”
• Jinsun Yang, Sociology, “Gender Dynamics in Non-binary Sports Spaces: Korean Queer Women Games’ Challenge the Two Sex System in Sports”

Faculty research grants

• Hiba Ali, art, “Amazonification.”
• Johanna Bard Richlin, anthropology, “Anxiety, Autonomy, Activism: An Ethnographic Study of Vaccine Hesitancy Among Mothers in Oregon,” Mazie Giustina Fund for Women in the Northwest.
• Corinne Bayerl, comparative literature, “The Stage on Trial: Theatrical Battles in Early Modern Europe.”
• Claire Herbert, sociology, “Mothers Squatting to Secure Housing: A Three-Case Comparison of Organized Illegal Occupation in Detroit, Oakland, and Philadelphia.”
• Masami Kawai, cinema studies, “Valley of the Tall Grasses” (film), Mazie Giustina Fund for Women in the Northwest.
• Jina Kim, East Asian languages and literatures, “Sounding Women: Chang Tokjo’s Mid-Century Korean Radio Novels (1914-2003).”
• Leah Lowthorp, anthropology, “Deep Cosmopolitanism: Kutiyattan, Dynamic Tradition, and Global Heritage in India.”
• Ernesto Martinez, indigenous, race and ethnic Studies, “The Boy Who Became a River” (film).
• Stephen Rodgers, music, “The Songs of Clara Schumann.”
• Yvette Saavedra, women’s, gender and sexuality studies, “Living la mala vida: Transgressive Feminisms, Morality, and Nationalism in 19th Century California, 1800-1850.”