Stanford Report, June 4, 2008

Gender research institute announces new faculty, graduate fellows

Fellowships provide a forum for faculty and students to network and to foster interdisciplinary research

The Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research has announced its faculty and graduate dissertation fellows for 2008-09. The faculty fellowships provide a forum for networking between gender scholars and faculty who are interested in bringing gender analysis into their work. The graduate dissertation fellowships were created in 1994 to foster interdisciplinary exploration of gender research.

Following is a list of faculty fellows and their current projects. Unless otherwise noted, fellows are members of the Stanford faculty.

R. Richard Banks, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law. Banks is writing a book about the state of marriage in the black middle class that will situate decisions about marriage and childbearing as a result of negotiations between men and women.

Terry S. Desser, associate professor of radiology. Desser is addressing the underrepresentation of women in the subspecialty of diagnostic radiology.

Paulla A. Ebron, associate professor of anthropology. Ebron is working on a book-length project titled "Making Tropical Africa in the Georgia Sea Islands."

Paula Findlen, the Ubaldo Pierotti Professor in Italian History, co-director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and associate director of the Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology. Findlen is completing a book on women and science in 18th-century Italy titled In the Shadow of Newton: Laura Bassi and Her World.

Margot G. Gerritsen, assistant professor of energy resources engineering. Gerritsen will use her fellowship to expand experiential opportunities for her students and to provide support for her popular website, http://smartenergyshow.com, which focuses on energy issues.

Sabine C. Girod, assistant professor of plastic surgery and chief of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. Girod is collaborating with the Office of Diversity and Gender at the Medical School to support a program to expand diversity and excellence in recruitment of faculty in medicine.

Robert M. Gray, the Alcatel Lucent Technologies Professor of Engineering. Gray will explore means of improving awareness of the importance of and methods for recruiting and mentoring female students and junior faculty for careers in academia.

Deborah M. Kolb, the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women and Leadership, School of Management, Simmons College (Boston). Kolb will be collaborating with Associate Professor Debra Meyerson of the Stanford School of Education on work-life issues for businesswomen.

Fredi Kronenberg, professor of clinical physiology in rehabilitation medicine and director, Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at Columbia University. Kronenberg will work with Stanford colleagues to develop a new hot-flash-physiology research team to examine the mechanism of menopausal hot flashes and novel technologies for detecting hot-flash onset and mitigation of hot flashes.

Helen E. Longino, professor of philosophy. Longino will be working on a project examining convergences and divergences in Western feminist and postcolonial feminist approaches to knowledge, rationality and the idea of science.

Vinod Menon, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Menon will use his fellowship to support undergraduate research into gender differences in functional brain connectivity.

Lynn Meskell, professor of anthropology. Meskell will use her fellowship to support a female research assistant to help with her current research examining the constructs of natural and cultural heritage and the related discourses of empowerment around Kruger National Park, 10 years after democracy in South Africa.

Deboleena Roy, assistant professor of women's studies, San Diego State University. Roy will be developing a project in feminist neuroethics and will be working on her manuscript, "Mapping Gender, Hormones and Neurons: Feminist Configurations in the Neurosciences."

Nhung Tuyet Tran, assistant professor of history, University of Toronto. Tran is working on a social history of Vietnamese gender, tentatively titled Vietnamese Women at the Crossroads of Southeast Asia: Gender and Society in the Early Modern Period.

Christine Min Wotipka, assistant professor of education. Wotipka is re-developing two courses in the School of Education: Gender and Higher Education and Education and the Status of Women: Comparative Perspectives.

Richard N. Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and chair of the Department of Chemistry. Zare will use his fellowship to provide two undergraduate women with employment in his laboratory over summer quarter.

Dissertation fellows

Following is a list of graduate student fellows and their projects. They are all Stanford students.

Megan Bryson, doctoral candidate in religious studies. Bryson is writing a dissertation titled "The Domestication of Baijie Shengfei: Gender and Ethnicity in Chinese Religion."

Jocelyn Lim Chua, doctoral candidate in anthropology. Chua is writing a dissertation titled "Circulating Death: Suicide, Sovereignty and Productions of Affect in Kerala, South India."

Benedetta Faedi, doctoral candidate in law. Faedi is researching practices of sexual violence against women and girls in Haiti.

Vida Mia Garcia, doctoral candidate in modern thought and literature. Garcia is writing a dissertation on heritage tourism, race, gender and national identity in the context of Chicano/a cultural production in the U.S. Southwest.

Heather Green, doctoral candidate in art history. Green is working on her dissertation, "Space Invaders? Artists in the East Village, 1977-1983," looking at artists' work and activity in one of New York's most hotly contested neighborhoods.

Marie Lasnier, doctoral candidate in French literature. Lasnier is studying the evolution of travel literature in France in the 20th century.

Kylea Laina Liese, doctoral candidate in anthropology. Liese is writing on maternal death in the peripheries of Afghanistan.

For more information about Clayman Institute fellowships, visit the web at http://gender.stanford.edu.