About
Awarded annually for the senior essay which best exemplifies advance in scholarship gained by focusing on women or gender roles and/or by employing feminist theory.
Eligibility
Senior essays written by majors in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies will be considered.
Past Recipients
| 2025 | Sophia Kanga: Perfect Bodies Under Perfect Control: Female Circus Aerialists and the American Physical Culture Movement, 1880-1931 |
| 2024 | Grace Lawrie: Mother’s Milk: Sovereignty, Land, and Reproductive Healthcare in the Work of Katsi Cook |
| 2023 | Domenic Jancaterino: Maternal Affection: Cooking as Generational Memory in the Syrian Diaspora |
| 2022 | Iman Jaroudi Identity & Invisibility in the F(ace) of Trauma: Experiences of Relational Violence in the Ace-Aro Community |
| 2021 | Abigail Leonard Bridging the Divide: Revealing the Carceral/Military Continuum in the Stories of Abu Ghraib and Dee Deidre Farmer |
|
2020 |
Sophia Krohn “Welcome to America, Yanela: Childhood, Visual Media, and a Politics of Activated Innocence” Maxwell Richardson I Cannot Go Home as I Am: Exploring Identity in Black Queer Men at Yale in context of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic.” |
|
2019 |
Liam Riley After The Burn: Queer Kinship and Performance Practices in Ballroom Communities as Alternative Home-Making Rita Wang “Poor But Proud”: Explaining the Racial Welfare Enrollment Gap in Rural Alabama |
|
2018 |
Emmanuel Cantor “What Makes a Man a Man”: Constructions of Religious Zionist Masculinity in the Yeshiva Isadora Milanez Making Gender and Domestic Work in Brazil |
| 2017 | Kathy Amiliategui The Fabric of Society: Exploitation and Grassroots Activism in the Los Angeles Garment Industry
Laura Goetz Anemic Science: A bio-ethnographic Case Study on Asking Better Questions |
| 2016 | Helen Caldwell Revenge Pornography and the Law: Beyond a Framework of How to Legislate, and Toward a Framework of Why” |
| Emily Hays Dalit Women’s Movements in India from Independence to Khairlanji: Claims to the Center | |
| 2015 | Taylor Nicolas ”Who Was Your Grandfather on Your Mother’s Side?” Law, Seduction, and Racial Identity in 1932 Virginia |
| 2014 | Hilary O’Connell Public Health for Public Bodies: Harm Reduction, Sex Work, and the Politics of Intervention |
| 2014 | Jenna Cook Constructing Kinship: Longing, Loss, and the Politics of Reunion in China |
| 2013 | Rebecca Suldan Coalitions, Compromise, and the Costs of Change: Domestic Violence Activism and Federal Public Policy, 1992-1996 |
| 2013 | Yemurai Mangwendeza Experience and Policy: Women’s Micro-Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment in Zimbabwe |
| 2012 | Joan Gass Queer Colonialism? International LGBT Funding in Bangalore, India |
| 2012 | Esi Hutchful Shifting Narratives: Radicalized Representations of Rape Victims and Perpetrators in News Media |
| 2011 | Rhiana Gunn-Wright Breaking the Brood Mare:Representation, Welfare Policy and Teen Pregnancy in New Haven |
| 2011 | Jessica Moldovan Feminist History: Evolution, Development, and Politics in the Aftermath of the Sears Case. |
| 2010 | Mihan Lee Breaking Barriers: Addressing Structural Obstacles to Social Service Provision for Asian Survivors of Domestic Violence |
| 2009 | Claire Purcell, “Change I Must”: Toward a Theory of Agency in Women’s Drug Recovery |
| 2009 | Jessica Svendsen, Kara Walker and Toni Morrison: Aesthetic Representations of the Unspeakable |
| 2008 | Lea Megan Krivchenia, The Southern Mothers’ Front: Nationalism and Motherhood in Sri Lanka through a Feminist Lens |
| 2007 | Claire Helen Pavlovic, Cultural Continutiy and Female Agency: Female Suicide Bombers in the Second Palestinian Intifada |
| 2007 | Anna Lvovsky |
| 2006 | Sarah Scott Stillman, The Body that Was Not Jessica’s: A Feminist Autopsy of the “Missing White Girl Syndrome” |
| 2005 | Mirinda Ann Gillespie |
| 2004 | Cathy Ramos de la Aguilera, Disrupting Street Harassment: Performance, Gender, Race, and Resistance |
| 2004 | Sophie Irene Raseman, From Welfare to Bridefare: The Political and Policy Shift to Familialism in U.S. Social Policy |
| 2003 | Alice Elizabeth Wolfram, “Beare witnesse, I prae yow: she calls her whoare”: Defamation, Social Networks, and the Life Course in Early Modern England |
| 2002 | Eugenie Alexandra Brinkema |
| 2001 | Grace Anna Rollins |
| 2000 | Kari Braaten |
| 1999 | Francesca Celia Myman, The Mechanical Vamp, the Cybernetic Siren: Explorations of the “Nature” of the Mechanical Woman |
| 1999 | Anisha Sasheen Dasgupta, Exceptio Quae Probat Regulam (The exception that tests the rule): Women and Clothmaking in Fourteenth Century England |
| 1999 | Deborah Dinner |
| 1998 | Cary Franklin, “Feminism Reflected “in the Mirror of Thought: Dora Marsden, Rebecca West, and Feminist Modernism |
| 1998 | Gretchen Elisabeth Boger, Pushing the Envelope: The Civil Rights Activism of Pauli Murray |
| 1997 | Sydney Sawyer, Subculture. Gender, and “The South”: Wasichana Wa Barabarani* in a slum of Nairobi |
| 1996 | Elizabeth Mara Grandia, From Dawn ‘Til Dawn: Valuing Women’s Work in the Petén, Guatemala |
| 1996 | Vanita Gupta, Women in the Bharatiya Janata Party: Engendering the “Hindu Nation” |
| 1995 | Sameena Shina Majeed, Feminist Voices: An Ethnographic Examination of Feminist Consciousness in Urban Pakistani Women |
| 1994 | Elizabeth Raphael Wolff, Fragmented Women, Fetishism in the Art of Hannah Hoch and George Grosz
Galen Leigh Sherwin, Domestic Fiction and the Discourse of Compromise: Gender and Genre in Louisa May Alcott’s March Trilogy |
| 1993 | Rachel Lisa Mesch, The Politics of Textuality, Midrashic Representations of the Sexual Encounter |
| 1993 | Sandhya Lakshmi Subramanian, The Look of Subjectivity |
| 1992 | Nina Rauh Morrison |
| 1991 | Glenn Michael Zuber |
| 1991 | Micol Seigel, Womanspirit Magazine: (Re-) Incarnating the Goddess |
| 1990 | Sarah Lynne Perry, The Feminist Challenge to an All-Male Clergy: The Struggle for Women’s Ordination in the Protestant Episcopal |
| 1989 | Josephine Greene, Of Drawing Rooms and College Rooms; Education, Isolation, & Intimacy in the Work of Virginia Woolf |
| 1989 | Blyth Denison Taylor, The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women: A Study in Gender Politics |
| 1988 | Lilian J. Autler, “Fire and Tenderness”: The Women’s Organization and the State in Revolutinoary Nicaragua |
| 1988 | Erin Suzanne Kelly, Cassat’s The Boating Party and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: The Woman Artist and the Representation of the Madonna |
| 1987 | Nell Bernstein |
| 1987 | Monica Mueller, “you… a revolution… you… the first real change.” –Nina Hagen |
| 1987 | Heather Weidemann, When Men and Women Speak: Thematics of Gender in the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning |
| 1986 | Yvonne Zylan |
| 1984 | Allison Coleman |
| 1983 | Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, The Impact of MNC’s on Malay Female Factory Workers and on Malaysian Development Policy in the 80’s |