"I had the opportunity to work one-on-one with Elisabeth Armstrong, through first a Quigley research fellowship in my junior year and later with Mellon research grant over the summer that followed, to assist her with research on international women’s conferences and the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) for her forthcoming book Neoliberalism’s Other: The All India Democratic Women’s Association and Globalization’s Politics.
I began by transcribing interviews Lisa had conducted with AIDWA activists while she was in India sitting at Smith College and ended up in Bombay that summer, after learning life history interviewing techniques myself, interviewing AIDWA activists about their experiences at the 1995 Beijing conference. Lisa, as vivacious and generous as she is, was a phenomenal mentor whose thoughtfulness and resourcefulness made my research so very tangible." - Indus Chadha '09, on her 2007-08 Quigley Fellowship: International Women's Conferences, WWII-2007 with Professor Lisa Armstrong.

During the spring semester of my junior year I worked as a Quigley fellow for Susan Van Dyne, helping her prepare for her Spring 2009 Presidential Seminar on cultural literacy which she co-teaches with Kevin Quashie. During the course of the semester, I researched the story behind the women's suffrage movement, focusing especially on Matilda Joslyn Gage, a key player who is often ignored, and studied the appropriation of black performance forms by white mainstream culture. I learned so much, not only about these two topics, but about using library resources, internet databases, and online tools like RefWorks, and I really appreciated the opportunity to work one-on-one with a professor in SWG - Claire Wilson '09 on her 2007-08 Quigley Fellowship with Professor Susan Van Dyne.
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Rising junior majors compete for a limited number of Quigley research fellowships for their junior year (either semester or during interterm, depending on faculty member's needs). These paid research fellowships enable qualified juniors to work one-on-one with a faculty member in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender on a research or curricular project.
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QUIGLEY FELLOWSHIPS AWARDED FOR 2009-2010

Love Stories - Ambreen Hai - Awarded to Laura Soforenko, '11 - A full-year fellowship assisting with research for a First Year Seminar entitled "Love Stories," where we'll read British, American and postcolonial literature and film (including Romeo and Juliet, Remains of the Day, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Funny Boy, West Side Story, Earth) to examine how notions of individual romantic or sexual desire are structured (limited, shaped) by social and historical constructions of race, class, gender, nation, sexuality. We'll also consider how many counter-narratives (queer, interracial) seek to contest those constructions. The other course is South Asian Autobiographical Fictions, to be taught in Spring 2010, where we'll look at how different South Asian writers (including the diaspora) narrate lives in order to create broader meanings about nation, community, race, gender, family, and so on. The Quigley fellow will help in both course developments by researching theoretical, scholarly-critical and cultural materials to supplement the primary readings.

Gender and Travel in East Asia - Kimberly Kono - Awarded to Anna Eisen, '11 - A Spring 2010 fellowship focusing on research for a class on gender and travel in East Asia, planned for 2010. Following a broad definition of travel incorporating not only tourism but also migration, diaspora, colonialism, and sex trafficking, this course will examine the impact of gender on these different kinds of travel as explored in literature and film. Potential topics covered in the course include fiction by first-generation Asian immigrants to the U.S., the biography of a Japanese woman sold into overseas prostitution during the early 1900s, and several cinematic representations of travel in East Asia such as Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003).While the course will focus on literary and cinematic texts related to modern East Asia (particularly Japan), critical readings theorizing these different forms of travel will also be used to create a theoretical framework for these investigations.

Victorian Sexualities - Cornelia Pearsall - Awarded to Aiden Bartelt, '11 - Assisting in the production of an anthology of Victorian writings on sexuality. The Victorian period is commonly understood to be one of tremendous sexual repression, but this anthology, whose working title is "Victorian Sexualities," will document the explosion of discursive representations of a wide array of sexual desires and identities. These writings are in increasing demand by scholars and students in a range of disciplines, and this project aims to collect representative texts drawn from historical, anthropological, literary, medical, legal and social science sources. The fellow will develop a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary source materials; to locate, collect, and read a range of relevant materials and write detailed synopses and critical responses; and to help with the technical aspects of putting together a substantial final document, including photocopying, collating, and searching for copyright information.

Daniel Rivers - National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), 1973 to present - Awarded to Zeina Dajani, '11 - A full-year fellowship working on a history of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) from its founding in 1973 to the present.  Since its inception, the NGLTF has been at the center of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) civil rights movement. Over the decades, it has launched individual campaigns focused on overturning sodomy laws in the United States, ending the ban on gay men and lesbians in the U.S. military, fighting anti-gay violence, securing family and domestic rights for lesbians and gay men, and raising public awareness of the AIDS epidemic. This project will provide a genealogy of the larger LGBT freedom struggle, exploring conflicts and changes in the overall movement through an analysis of the development of one of its most important groups.  Central questions will include: the tension between radical and reformist goals, changing definitions of sexual minority communities, and the influence of lesbian-feminist activism on the Task Force in the late 1970s and 1980s.  The research work will focus on the NGLTF papers, housed in the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University, and available through interlibrary loan. The fellow will help analyze and annotate the Task Force records on microfilm and conduct library and archival research.

Private Letters/Public Lives: A Queer Love Story - Marilyn Schuster - Awarded to Alix Korn, '11 - A full-year fellowship editing fifteen years (1981-1995) of the correspondence between Jane Rule and Rick Bébout. Rule (1931-2007), a lesbian writer who lived on Galiano Island in British Columbia, and Bébout, a gay activist, writer and journalist born in 1950 who lives in Toronto, became acquainted through letters when Rule started to contribute to The Body Politic, a Toronto gay liberationist newspaper published between 1971-1987 where Bébout was an editor. They exchanged letters regularly at least once a month from 1981 until Rule’s death in 2007. Both Rule and Bébout left the U.S. and took Canadian citizenship for personal and political reasons: she during the McCarthy era, he during the Vietnam War. In their letters, Rule and Bébout engage many of the major issues that have defined gay, lesbian and feminist politics in the last two decades, from pornography and censorship to HIV/AIDS, resistance and loss. As they get to know each other they also discuss family, friendship, sexuality and community with great feeling and candor. The letters tell a moving story of friendship, politics and work and constitute an important document in social history. The fellow will help condense over 2000 pages of letters in typescript into a 250-300 page book that highlights major events in l/g/b/t history and that follows the remarkable story of the friendship that developed between Rule and Bébout through the letters. The book is intended for a general audience. An Introduction and short essays throughout the volume will provide background about people and events referred to in the letters. The fellow will research and writing skills and a background in feminist and queer studies to help research references to people and events in the letters and to draft short essays to provide context for readers of the correspondence.

Public Histories - Susan Van Dyne - Awarded to Katy Morris, '11 - A Fall 2009 fellowship to develop course materials about women’s archives (such as the Sophia Smith Collection and other regional resources) and their uses in public histories. Our work together will be to research, read and discuss current debates about the construction of public history and its role in shaping collective memory; the pedagogical and educational strategies for disseminating archival knowledge (that is, how do private, domestic and archival materials about women’s experience “go public’ in curricular materials for classrooms, historic sites, monuments, documentaries etc); the links between activism and preservation and interpretation of women’s experiences. Skills: Some archival research experience either in coursework or volunteering or interning in the SSC or College archives. Interest in reading and discussing the topic. Ability to use electronic databases efficiently and create annotated bibliographies and reading notes through RefWorks.