Pembroke Center
Tags Undergraduate

Enid Wilson Undergraduate Fellowship

Funding Opportunities

The Enid Wilson Undergraduate Fellowship supports innovative research by undergraduate honors students from any department pursuing work related to women and gender.

    Application materials should include:

    • a three to five page description of your research project
    • a letter of support from your advisor
    • a brief description of how you would use the grant funds, if awarded

    2021/22 Recipient

    Lily Willis Lily Willis ’22.5
    Gender and Sexuality Studies, English
    "Expressing the Inexpressible," and Other Queer Sentiments: Language and Self in Contemporary Queer Memoir

    How do you write yourself? In the field of Gender and Sexuality Studies, many scholars debate the validity of "essentialist" arguments about gender or sexuality. Queer studies has arisen as a stance of critical thought towards the assumptions we make about such things. With thinkers including Leo Bersani and Audre Lorde, Lily Willis's work looks at the way writers use queer memoir as auto-theory, from which they make sense of their own embodied and personal experience. Willis reads Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Jeremy Atherton Lin's Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House with an eye towards the ways each writer constructs what love, desire, gender, and language are and can be. Attentive to the ways these queer memoirists write their own intersecting identities, Willis's work explores the freedom and constraints of language as a tool for self-articulation. By centering the voices of individual writers on their own lives, she invokes the idea that the universal is in the particular. This way, she posits, we can learn from ourselves. 
     

    Past Recipients

    • Tabitha Payne ’20, Development Studies
      Golden Voice
    • Camila Pelsinger ’20, International Relations
      Restorative responses to gender-based violence in the United States & New Zealand
    • Mohammed-Reda Semlani ’20, Development Studies; Economics
      The economic impact of the Argan tree on the local communities in southwestern Morocco
    • Makedah Hughes ’19, Comparative Literature
      “Mauve (2010) by Fatou Diome: A Translation Exploration of the Linguistic Constructions of Blackness”
    • Caroline Mulligan ’19, English and History
      Landdyke Legacies
    • Andy M.T. Pham ’19, Ethnic Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies
      Pushing for Purity: Conceptions and Consequences of Cleanliness during the US AIDS Epidemic of the 80s and 90s
    • Margot Cohen ’18, International Relations
      Women’s Rights as Human Rights: The Case of Femicide in Chile
    • Emily Sun ’18, Ethnic Studies
      “The Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place”: Subterranean Bodies and Disoriented Space in Women of Color Performance Art
    • Natalie Zeif ’18, Education
      Negotiating Sexuality and School Work in South Florida: Anita Bryant’s Anti-Queer Teacher Movement
    • Camille Garnsey ’17, Latin American Studies and Public Health
      The history of reproductive rights in Cuba
    • Katherine Grusky ’17, History, Latin American Studies
      Digging Below the Surface: Gender and Family Relations in Chilean Copper Mine, El Teniente, 1904-1930
    • Andrea Zhu ’17, Development Studies
      Specter of the Past, Intrusion of the Future: Gender and (Im)mobility at the China-Myanmar Border