The Pembroke Center is proud to recognize the scholarly achievement represented by the recipients of our student prizes for 2024-25. These prizes provide a snapshot of the outstanding interdisciplinary scholarly work in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies that Brown undergraduate and graduate students produce in a range of departments and programs across campus. The selection committee received a record number of nominations this year, and the Pembroke Center thanks the student nominees for their work and the faculty members who nominated them and served as their advisors.

Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize

For an outstanding dissertation in the area of women's, gender, and or/sexuality studies.

Prizewinner: Harper Shalloe, Modern Culture and Media, “Sick, Sad World: Holism and Less-Than-Human Thought”
This dazzling dissertation stages an encounter between psychoanalysis and holism in their theoretical and therapeutic guises. It builds on historical scholarship on the libertarian, even fascist, affiliations of twentieth-century proponents of systems biology as political ideology to examine what Shalloe calls the “curious allure” of systems thinking for contemporary wellness culture and critical thought, demonstrating that these seemingly disparate domains meet in an undiscriminating embrace of concepts like complexity and microbial community that authorize an understanding of ecological entanglement as a presumed ethical, political, and therapeutic good. Ultimately turning to psychoanalytic theory and trans studies, this brilliant study argues for a notion of wellness defined not by personal purity or collective holism; rather, it advocates for resistance to “redemptive endeavors” by a subject purporting to be neither whole, nor fully knowable, nor optimally cured. The wittiness of Shalloe’s prose is matched by the incisiveness of their critique.

Honorable Mention: Allyson LaForge, American Studies, “Materializing Futurity: Networks of Native Women’s Organizing in the Northeast”
Against portrayals of Indigenous communities and intertribal connectivity in decline, this ambitious dissertation uses Indigenous feminist, decolonial, and interdisciplinary methods to center the ongoing work of Northeast Native communities to secure thriving homelands and waterways, heritage material artifacts, economic stability, and sovereignty for present and future generations. LaForge’s commitment to the goals of the communities she studies is evident in the collaborative and activated labor she undertook to participate in material caretaking, to promote intentional public visibility and representation, and to bolster cultural legibility through education. Using material objects, tribal archives, and oral histories alongside traditional archival records, this exemplary study traces the centrality of women to land and knowledge preservation in the Indigenous Northeast.

Joan Wallach Scott Prize

For an outstanding honors thesis by a Gender and Sexuality Studies (GNSS) concentrator.

Prizewinner: Alissa Simon, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Political Science, “Private Bodies, Public Protections: Imagining an Affirmative Privacy Right in Domestic Violence Legal Reform”
The association of domestic space with privacy is precisely what can make it both protective and dangerous when violence is perpetrated behind closed doors by intimate partners or family members or by an invasive and carceral state. This incisive, balanced study argues that the legal concept of privacy in the U.S. does not have to undermine women’s safety in the home. Simon shows how the discourse of human rights can be used to reconsider local policing, advocacy, and judicial practices to reimagine a more affirmative concept of privacy that protects survivors and their autonomy. This original, beautifully argued and broadly researched thesis prompts us to think about classic political concepts like privacy and human rights in generative new ways.

Ruth Simmons Prize

For an outstanding honors thesis in any field on questions having to do with women, gender, or sexuality.

Prizewinner: Shravya Sompalli, Ethnic Studies and Computer Science, “Mapping ‘Tech Against Trafficking’: State Surveillance, Corporate Datafication, and Grassroots Cartographies”
Working at the intersection of ethnic studies and technology/data studies, Shravya Sompalli advances a powerful critique of numerous institutions and technologies that purport to fight human trafficking and worker exploitation, including state-sponsored border surveillance, corporate interests, and non-governmental anti-trafficking organizations. Her sophisticated digital counter-mapping project (“body workers’ atlas”) intervenes in “tech against trafficking” discourse and demonstrates her expertise in both ethnographic and data science methods. Exploring the potential “to use technology and accompanying technological discourse to the benefit of massage and sex workers in response to anti-trafficking technoscience over the past decade,” Sompalli is exemplary in her commitment to imagining and developing alternative technologies and models that respect workers’ rights, agency, and expressed needs.

Honorable Mention: Anna Brent-Levenstein, Sociology and History, “Women Are Our Rehabilitation: Familial Labor and Advocacy in an Era of Mass Incarceration”
Anna Brent-Levenstein’s sociology thesis represents an extraordinary contribution to the study of mass incarceration in the United States. Grounding her research in original oral histories and feminist sociology, Brent-Levenstein demonstrates how the understanding of mass incarceration is incomplete without the stories of the women who navigate the system from the outside on behalf of incarcerated family members. Her thesis challenges the prevailing idea of these women as victims by expanding the understanding of legal “expertise” and by centering the voices of women as key intermediaries. Brent-Levenstein shows how the labor and expertise of women with incarcerated family members make them the true “rehabilitators” in the criminal justice system.

Honorable Mention: Alexandra Mork, History and Political Science, “State-Crossed Lovers: Evasive, Interracial Marriages in Nineteenth-Century Virginia”
Alexandra Mork’s history thesis focuses on “evasive” marriage among interracial couples in Virginia in the late 1800s. Mork narrates the history of couples who, to avoid Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, traveled to nearby Washington, D.C., where no marriage prohibition existed, got married, and returned to Virginia, as married (and thus legal) couples. Drawing on extensive research in the local archives of Virginia and the National Archives in Washington, D.C., Mork recovers the stories of couples, who were both ordinary and extraordinary. Bridging the gap between individuals’ lives and the law, Mork shows how “proclaiming a legal doctrine ‘settled’ frequently hides an unsettled reality” and demonstrates how individual Americans have challenged legal fictions and how in doing so, they revise our understanding of the law in action.