Departmental Prizes
| For Undergraduate Students | See past prize recipients |
| Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women's Studies |
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| Joan Wallach Scott Prize | |
For Graduate Students |
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| Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize |
The Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women's Studies
The Pembroke Center is pleased and honored to offer the Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women’s Studies. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding honors thesis on questions having to do with women or gender. 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.
If you wish to make a nomination, please send the following to Box 1958 by May 1:
- thesis adviser’s evaluation
- a copy of the thesis
The Ruth Simmons Prize carries with it an award of $1,000.
Full list of recipients of the Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women's Studies
2012 Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women's Studies
"The Female Mind and the Absent Body: Fadul’s thesis, entitled “The Female Mind and the Absent Body: Writing Female Subjectivity,” is a literary investigation into how women think about their bodies. To do this, she examines the writing of female subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), María Luisa Bombal’s La Amortajada (1938) and Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico Famigliare (1963), from England, Chile, and Italy, respectively. Her thesis examines how each of these writers shapes and incorporates an absent body as she writes the mind and how these texts enact forms of resistance to defining the body according to societal norms. Drawing from theories of gender performativity, the male gaze, and female autobiography, she looks in particular at the importance of self-definition of the body for the protagonists in each of these texts. Fadul explores how a less rigid or imposed bodily experience can reduce the alienation experienced by many women who think of their bodies as external objects. This summer Fadul plans to pursue an internship at Norton Publishing Co. in New York. In a few years she hopes to return to school to pursue a graduate degree in Comparative Literature or Education. She also hopes to bridge the work begun in her thesis by bringing themes of gender studies and feminist theory to youth development. |
Natalia FadulJoan Wallach Scott Prize
The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women annually awards the Joan Wallach Scott Prize for an outstanding honors thesis in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Joan Wallach Scott is the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Among her many books are Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005), and The Politics of the Veil: Banning Islamic Headscarves in French Public Schools (2007). Professor Scott taught at Brown from 1980-1985, where she was Nancy Duke Lewis Professor and Professor of History. She was the founding director of the Pembroke Center.
Each year the Pembroke Center awards this prize for an outstanding thesis by a Gender and Sexuality Studies Concentrator. If you wish to nominate a dissertation, please send to Box 1958:
- A nominating letter including a brief description of the thesis
- A letter of support from a second member of the dissertation committee
- A copy of the dissertation
Click for a list of all Joan Wallach Scott Prize recipients
Congratulations to the 2012 Joan Wallach Scott Prize recipient Kathryn A. Davis "Seeing Queerly, Selling Queerly: Reconceptualizing LGBTQ-Targeted Television Advertising and Audience Reception" Davis's honors thesis, "Seeing Queerly, Selling Queerly: Reconceptualizing LGBTQ-Targeted Television Advertising and Audience Reception" explores the socio-cultural factors that have led to the growth of niche marketing on television to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community, and the response of this community to such advertising. Davis explores the history of LGBTQ niche advertising and debates about the political implications of this marketing. She examines the distinction between explicitly gay-targeting advertisements with “gay vague” advertisements that are intended to appeal to this community in a coded manner that will not be understood by straight consumers. Davis also analyzes the processes of ad reception and the political potential of advertising. She posits that while there is limited potential for oppositional politics through niche marketing, in closely examining patterns of audience reception, there is considerable opportunity to understand the political positions occupied by the LGBTQ individuals in niche marketing and assimilation debates. Davis plans to move to San Francisco over the summer. She hopes to attend graduate school and pursue a career in the mental health field in the future. |
For Graduate Students
Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize
The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women annually awards the Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize for an outstanding dissertation in the area of feminist studies. Marie J. Langlois became a trustee emerita of the Corporation in 2007 having previously served as trustee and vice chancellor of the University since 1998. She served as a member of the Board of Fellows from 1992 to 1998, as a member of the Board of Trustees from 1980 to 1985, and as a trustee and treasurer of the University from 1988 to 1992. She received a bachelor of arts degree from Brown in 1964 and a master of business administration degree from Harvard University in 1967. Ms. Langlois recently retired as managing director of Washington Trust Investors, a division of Washington Trust Company. She currently serves on the boards of directors of the Rhode Island Foundation, Lifespan, Salve Regina University, Rhode Island Philharmonic and Music School, and Rhode Island Public Radio.
Each year the Pembroke Center awards this prize for a dissertation in areas related to gender studies or feminist analysis. If you wish to nominate a dissertation, please send to Box 1958 by current nomination deadline date (May 1):
- A nominating letter including a brief description of the thesis
- A letter of support from a second member of the dissertation committee
- A copy of the dissertation
The Marie J. Langlois Prize carries with it an award of $1,000.
Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize recipients
Congratulations to the 2012 Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize recipients
Daphna Oren-Magidor "'Make me a Fruitful Vine': Dealing with Oren-Magidor's dissertation focused on the experience of infertility in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and discussed this topic not only from a medical perspective but also from its cultural, gendered and emotional dimensions. It examined how infertile couples understood their condition, gave meaning to it, and ultimately sought to treat it. It also used infertility as a lens through which to explore the interactions between medicine and culture in this period. |
Pooja Rangan "Automatic Ethnography: Otherness, Indexicality, Rangan examines contemporary humanitarian initiatives where visual media are provided to dehumanized subjects (indigenous natives, children, animals, refugees) as a means of immediate self-empowerment. Frequently, the ethical imperative of immediate crisis-resolution requires the subjects of such projects to authenticate their otherness by drawing on the rhetorical tropes of directness, transparency, or indexicality. To challenge the ethnocentric connotations of these tropes of immediacy, she proposes focusing on the discursive and medial frames of “urgent” humanitarian intervention. Rangan is currently Assistant Professor of Culture and Media in in Eugene Lang College at the New School, and is in the process of adapting her dissertation for publication as a book. |
Helen Terry MacLeod Prize
From 1995-2007 the Pembroke Center awarded this prize for an outstanding undergraduate honors thesis that addressed questions of gender or women, or that brought a feminist analysis to bear on a topic of study.
MacLeod Prize recipients 1995-2007
In 2007, this award was changed from a prize for a completed honors thesis to a research grant available to support undergraduate honors research. Please click here for information on the grant.