The UO Center for the Study of Women in Society recently awarded more than $110,000 in grants to graduate and faculty researchers for projects as diverse as a study of gender and narrative among weight-loss surgery patients and research on Burmese women in Chinese border cities.

One of the center’s most prestigious grants, the Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship, went to doctoral candidate Iván Sanodval Cervantes. His dissertation topic is “The Intersections of Transnational and Internal Indigenous Migration: Gender, Kinship, and Care.”

Sandoval’s project is based on more than 20 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City, Zegache in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Salem, Oregon. The Grant Fellowship, which goes each year to an outstanding doctoral candidate, includes a stipend, health insurance and a tuition waiver, and this year totals about $33,000.

In all, 12 UO graduate students will receive awards ranging from $1,900 to $2,500. Eight faculty scholars will receive awards ranging up to $8,000 each.

Graduate student research awards went to: Lisa Beard, Department of Political Science; Kelsey Cummings, Jeremiah Favara and Thomas Schmidt, School of Journalism and Communication; Erin Gallo and Nagore Sedano, Department of Romance Languages; Tobin Hansen, Anna Sloan and Alexis Yalon, Department of Anthropology; Elizabeth Miller and Lauren Stewart, Department of Sociology; and Danielle Seid, Department of English.

Faculty grant awardees are: Alisa Freedman, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures; Gina Herrmann and Analisa Taylor, Department of Romance Languages; Sharon Luk and Elizabeth Wheeler, Department of English; Michelle McKinley, School of Law; Xiaobo Su, Department of Geography; and Reuben Zahler, Department of History.

Funds for two of the award winners come from a separate endowment, the Mazie Giustina Endowment for Research on Women in the Northwest. They are Freedman, who is launching research for a book on Japanese women who traveled to the United States for study in the 1950s, and Wheeler, whose project constitutes the final chapter of a book and focuses on a Pacific Northwest woman writer-artist whose work challenges dominant models of disability and environmental studies.

—From the Center for the Study of Women in Society