Ruth Bleier Scholarship in the Natural Sciences
Poojha Prabaharasundar (she/her) will be graduating in Spring 2025 with a double major in Psychology and Neurobiology and certificate in Gender & Women’s Studies. She is passionate about addressing the perceived gap between science and humanities and uses the history and critical thinking skills she learns from Gender & Women’s Studies coursework in her psychological research under the direction of Dr. Allyson Bennett, work as a caregiver, and work with Wisconsin Destination Imagination expanding after school enrichment for students. She hopes to continue to use these skills and knowledge as a healthcare professional after graduation.
Scholarship in LGBTQ+ Studies
Forrest Jensen (he/him) is a trans man at UW. Next year he will be a sophomore studying Political Science and Sociology along with getting a Criminal Justice and LGBT Studies certificate.
Last semester, he worked with LGBT Books to Prisoners, a non-profit that sends free books to incarcerated people throughout the country. Forrest spent most of his time there reading letters from incarcerated LGBTQ+ folks, and choosing books to send to them. He is planning on continuing to volunteer with this organization throughout the summer and using his experience to better understand and empathize with the struggles of incarcerated, especially incarcerated LGBTQ+, people.
Deborah A. Hobbins Graduate Student Award in Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice
Emma Wathen (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History, and History of Science, Medicine & Technology.
Her dissertation, titled A Disability History of Reproduction in the United States, looks at reproductive activism by and for disabled people in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. In it, she compares the stories of polio survivors who gave birth in iron lungs; pregnant psychiatric patients who underwent electric shock treatments; Little People of America members who adopted young little people; Native Americans with developmental disabilities who lost custody of their children or received coercive Depo-Provera injections; and disabled feminists who challenged reproductive rights organizations’ abortion politics. She argues that people with disabilities participated more widely in reproductive activism than has been recognized in the current historiography, and that the reproductive needs of disabled people nonetheless went neglected by social movements, whether because of inattention to the specific oppressions people with disabilities faced or external opposition that limited the political power of the movement as a whole. The chronologies and stakes of social movements change when historians foreground disabled people as activists with demands and reproductive beings with needs. Understanding of these social movements is therefore incomplete without “looking for” disability, to borrow historian Douglas Baynton’s phrase.
Emma intends to use the Hobbins Award to help fund a research trip to some archives she will be using to write herdissertation. Some archival collections she is looking into include March of Dimes local chapters, the University of Connecticut’s Handicapped Homemakers Project Records, and the Radcliff Institute’s Records of the Project on Women and Disability. She also plans to purchase a subscription to Newspapers.com, a database that contains newspaper records that will be invaluable for several of her dissertation chapters.
Feminist Scholars Fellowship
Ramzi Fawaz is a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016) and Queer Forms (2022). With Darieck Scott he coedited a special issue of American Literature titled “Queer About Comics,” which won the 2019 best special issue of the year award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Alongside Deborah E. Whaley and Shelley Streeby, he coedited Keywords for Comics Studies, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2022.
Dr. Fawaz’s new book project, Literary Theory On Acid, argues for the necessity of queer, feminist, and critical race studies approaches to the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. Psychedelics are class of drugs that produce mind-altering and consciousness expanding effects, including the loss of ego, the hyper-intensification of sensory experience, and feelings of cosmic oneness with the universe. He argues that these qualities can also describe a distinct orientation to human differences that acknowledges categories like race, gender, sexuality, and ability (as well as differences of temperament, personality, spiritual worldview) as highly variable and contingent sites of experimentation and play, rather than rigidly bounded identities. Toward this end, he explores a range of recent feminist, queer, and anti-racists popular culture texts—including Jenny Slate’s enchanted memoir Little Weirds, the multi-versal cinematic epic Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and Jeff VanderMeer’s visionary science fiction The Southern Reach Trilogy–to show how they deploy distinctly psychedelic aesthetic forms to shake their audiences out of habituated ways of understanding human diversity and multiplicity. Ultimately, Dr. Fawaz argues that a psychedelic framework for conceiving and grappling with the fact of difference can both combat stultifying forms of structural domination, but also loosen the grip of stubborn identitarianism in progressive political projects.