The Pembroke Center is proud to recognize the scholarly achievements represented by the recipients of our student prizes for 2025–26. These prizes provide a snapshot of the outstanding interdisciplinary scholarly work in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies produced by Brown undergraduate and graduate students in a range of departments and programs across campus.

These are the winners of this year’s Pembroke Center student research grants.

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After an intensive summer of renovation and moving, Pembroke Hall was officially reopened with a celebration on Friday, October 17, 2025. This marks the first time that the entire Pembroke Center has been housed in Pembroke Hall, the building constructed for and dedicated to the education of women in 1897.

2024-25 was a year of dynamic, meaningful growth at the Pembroke Center.

The Pembroke Seminar is a unique learning and research community. It comprises an intergenerational group of scholars — undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, visiting scholars, and guests — who together pursue a set of critical questions in weekly meetings over the course of an academic year.

Erin Perfect has joined the Archives team in a new role as processing archivist. This three-year position will enable the Archives to scale up its description, reference, and instruction services and help meet the needs of the Archives’ growing community of researchers.

Pembroke Center faculty Helis Sikk and Sarah Gamble worked with four UTRA student researchers over the summer of 2024 to further community-engaged research and develop an academic course syllabus. The UTRAs, or Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards, are granted to Brown students working with faculty on research and teaching projects during the academic year or the summer.

These are the winners of this year’s Pembroke Center student research grants.

The Reproductive Justice Collaborative summer UTRA/Laidlaw Scholars interviewed students and researchers at Brown engaged in reproductive justice advocacy and research, as well as community organizations, to learn more about gaps and overlaps in reproductive justice work, and how Brown can collaborate for greater impact.

2023-24 at the Pembroke Center featured strong collaborations, interdisciplinary conversations, and significant growth in all our program areas.

The Pembroke Seminar is a unique learning and research community comprising an intergenerational group of scholars — undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, visiting scholars, and guests — who together pursue a set of critical questions in weekly meetings over the course of a year.

When Michelle Rada, doctoral candidate in English, began her graduate student Interdisciplinary Opportunities proctorship with differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, little did she know the impact it would have on her career trajectory. Today, she credits the proctorship as the springboard into her career as an editor.

differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies launched its new online forum with work from Timothy Bewes, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Petra Kuppers, Irving Goh, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

Assistant Archivist Amanda Knox speaks to Johanna Fernández '93 about cataloguing the papers of incarcerated journalist and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal in this radio interview.

GNSS Lecturer Helis Sikk's Queer Visual Activism course provokes students to understand both aesthetic and political elements of visual culture.

Students build knowledge, hands-on skills as birthworkers in Reproductive Justice course

A current Brown student reflects on what the history of Pembroke College, the women's college in Brown University from 1891 until 1971, has to offer today's students. Weaving in material from the Pembroke Center Archives' Oral History Project, the student comments that the histories provide "an account of what it meant to attend a women's college during a century that saw radical changes in social and political ideas about gender."

Emily A. Owens, David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown, gave the annual Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77, P’06’09 Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies to a crowded audience of students, staff, and faculty. Owens discussed the mechanisms by which sexual violence became engrained into American society in its first centuries.

Groundbreaking collections amplify feminist scholarship and the voices of incarcerated people

New course in reproductive justice will provide 20 students with doula training and reproductive justice education.

New Pembroke Director names enhancing diversity initiatives, scholarship as priorities

With the papers of Hortense J. Spillers arriving at Brown last fall, the Pembroke Center Archives has deepened its archive of black feminist theory.

A $1.5 million gift establishing the Shauna M. Stark ’76 P’10 Postdoctoral Fellow will support the Center’s teaching and research mission, while a $300,000 gift to the Pembroke Center Archives will help preserve and promote women’s history.