The theses and dissertations nominated this year demonstrate the originality of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies scholarship in fields including Africana studies; American studies; anthropology; English; French and Francophone studies; history; history of art and architecture; medieval studies; political science; Portuguese and Brazilian studies; science, technology, and society; and sociology. The Pembroke Center recognizes the student nominees for their work and thanks 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: Semilore Sobande, English, “Ghostwriters: Blackness, Gender, and Nostalgia in Twentieth-Century Fiction”
This year’s Langlois prize-winning dissertation is a stellar example of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that develops and challenges the historical, linguistic, and theoretical frameworks of black critical theory, black feminist studies, and postcolonial theory. Interrogating the epistemological potential of literature to narrate history, Semilore Sobande argues that the social conditions of European modernity have been underwritten by a reliance on the invisible labor of black womanhood. In readings of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and the 1935 French film Princesse Tam Tam starring Josephine Baker, the dissertation looks at how various authors “leverage racial discourses that render the African diaspora history-less to create a cultural nostalgia concerned not with the accuracy of historical events but the preservation of white modernity.” It asks how black representation functions even when racial hierarchies work to bury the structural apparatus undergirding narrative and character. Identifying black women “as the seam” and “at the seam” that holds many transatlantic literary texts together or lets them fall apart, Sobande deploys the concept metaphor of the ghostwriter to describe the black women who “provide critical narrative cohesion from the margins of the plot.” These ghostwriters make narrative possible by creating the conditions for its arrangement, effectively enabling, in Professor Olakunle George’s words, “the plotlines of many twentieth-century works of fiction to take shape as acts of language and dramas of human desire.” Written in elegant prose, Sobande’s brilliant dissertation showcases diligent research, a capacious archive, and trenchant readings of literary and theoretical texts.
Honorable Mention: Sarah Christensen, History, “Intimate Histories of Enslaved Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400–1200”
In spite of scant and uneven source material, this rigorously researched, lucidly written, and highly original dissertation on women who were enslaved, transported, and sold in early medieval Europe constructs a genealogy of gendered slavery that both predates and shapes systems of exploitation that would later flourish in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Tracing a route from Iceland to Constantinople known as the Northern Arc, Sarah Christensen shows how enslaved women were not merely passive commodities but, rather, active vectors of cultural transmission and exchange. Insights into these women’s intimate lives across such vast terrain are drawn from untranslated Latin, Old English, Old Norse, and Byzantine Greek sources as well as translated Arabic and Middle Irish texts; in the absence of conventional archival sources such as legal and economic records, Christensen turns to saints’ lives, sagas, travel diaries, and fictional accounts to produce a methodologically groundbreaking study that, in the words of her advisor Professor Jonathan Conant, “is particularly adept at toggling between two parallel modes of interpretation: reading texts as literary constructions and reading them as evidence about the past.” Her research, attests Professor Emily Owens, “brings texture to the lives of women enslaved in this early era, but also participates in and adds critical nuance to conversations about varieties of unfreedom in global history.” The far-reaching implications of Christensen’s inventive contributions to medieval history, to our understanding of the embodied and relational dimensions of enslaved women’s lives, and to what can count as evidence in historiography lay the groundwork and serve as a model for future scholars across a range of disciplines.
Joan Wallach Scott Prize
For an outstanding honors thesis by a Gender and Sexuality Studies (GNSS) concentrator.
Prizewinner: Arlyn Patino, “U.S. Borne: The Pathology of the Mexicana Other, Diasporic Gendered Subjectivity in Chicago from the 1960s Onward”
Examining Chicago as a significant yet often unacknowledged geographic site of the Mexican diaspora in the United States, Arlyn Patino’s remarkable thesis explores medical discrimination as essential to constructing the discursive and ideological understanding of Mexican women in the United States. Bringing together the insights of Black and Latina feminist theory, research in local archives across Chicago, and analysis of published testimonies of Chicana community activists, Patino’s thesis constructs the story of how Mexicanas resisted and countered modes of violence that began with the medical and extended to other everyday forms, from the social to the domestic. As her advisor Iván Ramos notes, “U.S. Borne” is “a truly exemplary and outstanding honors thesis that manages to not only begin to shed light on an important yet often unacknowledged geographic site of the Mexican diaspora in the United States but also offers exciting new directions for this research.”
Ruth Simmons Prize
For an outstanding honors thesis in any field on questions having to do with women, gender, or sexuality.
Prizewinner: Reina Salama, Sociology, “The Paradox of Punitive Public Health: A Cultural Autopsy of HIV Criminalization in the United States”
Reina Salama’s extraordinary sociology thesis offers a compelling account of how the story of HIV criminalization in the United States is incomplete without an understanding of how cultural forces transformed a matter of public health into one of punishment. Salama’s thesis identifies and addresses a paradox: from the 1980s through the 2010s, the rate of new HIV infections declined, but HIV criminalization increased. By analyzing 108 news articles from Florida, the first state in the U.S to enact an HIV-specific criminal law, Salama demonstrates how the media sustained three normative associations with the disease: HIV as a weapon, anti-prostitution and the gendering of risk, and sexual activity as a moral wrong. These frameworks shifted over time but effectively communicated a persistent theme: “certain bodies, defined by race, gender, and sexual transgression, pose a threat to a normative public deserving of state protection.” As such, HIV criminalization was not a public health measure but rather a “project of racial and sexual governance.” Salama’s advisor Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve notes that the thesis represents “a real contribution to the field of sociology and law through her intersectional analysis of gender, sexuality and race.” Bringing together her research interests in the sociology of wrongful conviction and the history of HIV criminalization, Salama’s brilliant study is also exemplary in its interdisciplinarity.
Honorable Mention: Tigerlily Hillenbrand Arlt, Medieval Cultures, “The Late Medieval Pilgrimsvegen til Røldal”
With impressive theoretical and methodological sophistication, Tigerlily Hillenbrand Arlt’s medieval cultures thesis reconstructs the late medieval pilgrimage route in southwest Norway to the remote stave church of Røldal. Hillenbrand Arlt recreates the experience of the medieval pilgrim by assembling an impressive range of evidence including the landscape of the actual route; the church, its décor, crucifix and liturgical traditions; an array of literary sources; and archaeological and material evidence. Centering women’s presence, circumstances, and experiences as pilgrims and members of the pilgrimage community, her thesis posits the purpose of the Røldal pilgrimage as communally centered. Hilenbrand Arlt hiked the route to Røldal church herself last summer, and her at-times harrowing diary of the hike is offered in an appendix. “Amidst the rigorous scholarly determination that marks every page of this thesis,” enthuses her thesis advisor Susan Harvey, “a genuine exuberance of spirit shines through.”
Honorable Mention: Piper Wallace, History, “Performing Distinction at the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly, 1748–94: The Legibility and Stakes of Elite Heterosociability across the Revolutionary Divide”
Piper Wallace’s dazzling history thesis examines the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly from its founding in 1748 through 1794 as an institutional mechanism through which elite social authority was produced before and after the American Revolution. Drawing on primary sources that include the Assembly’s institutional records and publications, personal correspondence and private papers, published commentary, and contemporary observations, Wallace demonstrates how early American social hierarchy fundamentally depended on gendered labor that made elite distinction appear natural. Wallace reconstructs how the ease elite women were required to display at the Assembly was not ease at all but years of disciplined preparation enabling the performance of femininity in the service of both the British Empire and the new United States. Connecting her study of the eighteenth century to the present, Wallace’s conclusion invites us to consider how the Assembly’s central logic–that elite power must be continuously performed, collectively recognized, and made to look natural–“has not disappeared” but has “only changed its costume.”