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Ruth Simmons Prize

Funding Opportunities

The Pembroke Center is pleased and honored to offer the Ruth Simmons Prize. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding honors thesis on questions having to do with women, gender, or sexuality. In the spring, the Pembroke Center invites faculty in all fields to nominate honors theses for the prize. A committee of faculty who teach and write in the area of gender studies will make the selection.

Nominations are closed. Nominations were due by Wednesday, April 29, 2026.

If you wish to make a nomination, you should email the following to Pembroke_Center@brown.edu by the due date and time:

  • Thesis advisor’s evaluation
  • Copy of the thesis

The Ruth Simmons Prize carries with it an award of $2,000.

2025-26 Recipients

  • Reina Salama ’26, Sociology and Music
    “The Paradox of Punitive Public Health: A Cultural Autopsy of HIV Criminalization in the United States”
  • Honorable mention: Tigerlily Hillenbrand Arlt ’26, Classics and Medieval Cultures
    “The Late Medieval Pilgrimsvegen til Røldal”
  • Honorable mention: Piper Wallace ’26, History
    “Performing Distinction at the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly, 1748–94: The Legibility and Stakes of Elite Heterosociability across the Revolutionary Divide”

Past Recipients

  • 2024-25:
    • Shravya Sompalli ’25, Ethnic Studies and Computer Science
      “Mapping ‘Tech Against Trafficking:’ State Surveillance, Corporate Datafication, and Grassroots Cartographies”
    • Honorable mention: Anna Brent-Levenstein ’25, Sociology
      “Women Are Our Rehabilitation: Familial Labor and Advocacy in an Era of Mass Incarceration”
    • Honorable mention: Alexandra Mork ’25, History
      “State-Crossed Lovers: Evasive, Interracial Marriages in Nineteenth-Century Virginia”
  • 2023-24:
    • Kate Harty ’24, History
      “Sheltering Women: Coverture, Debt, and the Law in Post-Emancipation Virginia”
  • 2022-23:
    • Sofia Sacerdote ’22.5, American Studies
      “‘Dead but Not Disabled’: What the Lawsuit and Campaign to Change the CDC Definition of AIDS Reveal about Disability in Post-Regan America”
    • Honorable mention: Georgia Salke ’23, History
      “When Women Drink Like Men: A Gendered History of Alcoholics Anonymous' Early Years, 1935-1960”
    • Honorable mention: Katherine Xiong ’23, Comparative Literature
      “Post-apocalyptic Body World(ing): Transpacific Racial Capitalism, Coloniality, and Queer/Asian/Female Speculative Futures”
  • 2021-22:
    • Jamila Beesley ’22, American Studies, International and Public Affairs 
      “The Architects of the Solutions They Need: Dalit Feminism in the U.S. Caste Abolition Movement”
    • Honorable mention: Lillian Pickett ’22, American Studies
      “(En)gendering Violence, Imaging Safety: Carceral Politics in Rhode Island’s Feminist Movement, 1970-2009”
  • 2020-21:
    • Lyle Cherneff, Gender and Sexuality Studies
      “The Ties That Bind: Incest and Family-Making in the Postbellum South”
    • Honorable mention: Gemma Sack, History
      “Selling Mrs. Procreator: Eugenics, Homemaking, and American Nationalism in Women's Magazines, 1929-1939”
    • Honorable mention: Cal Turner, Comparative Literature
      “The Virtue of the Virago: Gender-Crossing Difference and the Social Life of the Early Modern Female Crossdresser”
  • 2019-20:
    • Sebastián Niculescu, Ethnic Studies
      “Ábreme: Performing Trans of Color Critique”
  • 2018-19:
    • Alex Burnett, History
      “Fighting Homophobia During the War on Crime: The Rise of Pro-Gay, Pro-Police Liberalism, 1967-80”
  • 2017-18:
    • Deborah Pomeranz, Ethnic Studies
      “Policing the City: How Discourses of Public Safety Reshaped New York”
  • 2016-17:
    • Rebecca Hansen, English, Nonfiction Writing
      “On Coming Forward”
  • 2015-16:
    • Melanie Abeygunawardana, English and Literary Arts
      “The Persistent Dialogue: Butch-Femme Erotics as Queer Reading”
  • 2014-15:
    • Leila Blatt, Africana Studies
      “From the Shadows of Choice: Activism, Power, and Black Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Justice”
  • 2013-14:
    • Charlotte Lindemann, English
      “Visions in Vertigo and The Turn of the Screw: A ‘reading-adventure’”
  • 2012-13:
    • Emma Janaskie, Modern Culture & Media
      “The Constant State of Desire: Thinking the Sexual Specificity of the Abjected/Fluid Female Body with Kristeva and Irigaray”
  • 2011-12:
    • Natalia Fadul, Comparative Literature
      “The Female Mind and Absent Body: Writing Female Subjectivity”
  • 2010-11:
    • Nandini Jayakrishna, International Relations
      “A Critical Convergence: Gender Development Theory and the Practice of Women’s Empowerment in the Indian Informal Sector”
  • 2008-09:
    • Soyoung Park, Sociology
      “Silenced Pain: The Korean Comfort Women’s Struggle to Matter”
  • 2007-08:
    • Sara Tabak Damiano, History
      “From the Shadows of the Bar: Law and Women’s Legal Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Newport”