Research Grants and Internships

The Pembroke Center invites applications from current Brown students, from any concentration or field, to apply for our research grants and internship. Please see individual grant descriptions and guidelines. Students with projects appropriate for more than one grant may apply for multiple grants, although it is unlikely a student would be awarded more than one.

Steinhaus Zisson Pembroke Center Research Grants
Helen Terry MacLeod Research Grant
Barbara Anton Internship Grant
Linda Pei Undergraduate Research Grant

The application period for 2012/13 grants is now closed.

Please submit application materials for all grants to:

The Pembroke Center
172 Meeting Street, Room 111
Box 1958
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912

Steinhaus/Zisson Pembroke Center Research Grants for Undergraduate and Graduate Students

The Beatrice Bloomingdale Steinhaus’33, P’60, P’65, GP’87, GP’91/Gertrude Rosenhirsch Zisson’30, P’61, P’63, GP’91 grants support undergraduate and graduate student research at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Student research may be on any topic related to the work of the Pembroke Center, with preference given to research on women's education, health, community activism, philanthropy, and economic status, and women's rights and well-being in the United States and in developing countries around the world.

Undergraduate students are invited to apply for grants up to $1,000. Graduate students may apply for grants up to a maximum of $2,000. Application materials include:

• a three to five page description of your research project
• a letter of support from faculty advisor
• amount requested and plan for allocated grant funds

The Steinhaus/Zisson Fund was provided by Nancy Steinhaus Zisson’65, P’91 and William Zisson’63, P’91 in memory of their mothers, Beatrice Bloomingdale Steinhaus’33, P’60, P’65, GP’87, GP’91 and Gertrude Rosenhirsch Zisson’30, P’61, P’63, GP’91, and the life changing education that they received at Pembroke College in Brown University. It was established in recognition of their family members who are alumnae and alumni of Brown University, including Margaret Steinhaus Sheppe’60, P’87, Harry R. Zisson’61, William Zisson’63, P’91, Nancy Steinhaus Zisson’65, P’9l, Laura Sheppe Miller’87, Michael B. Miller’87, Alex Zisson’91, and Emma Miller’16. These two women inspired a love of learning in their children and grandchildren, and a strong belief that education and self-improvement are important aspects of personal growth that do not stop with the end of formal schooling. They believed profoundly in women's rights and affordable education as a means to achieving these goals.

Navarra Buxton,'13
Anthropology

"OpenDoors Case Study: The Effects of Pre and Post Release Employment Readiness Programs in the U.S on Reducing Recidivism Rates Among Women"

Buxton’s research aims to uncover the strategies that OpenDoors uses to aid incarcerated and previously incarcerated women in finding jobs in Rhode Island, as well as identifying the gendered related variables that affect recidivism rates. OpenDoors is a non-profit organization in Rhode Island that provides resources to individuals released from prison. One of the programs that OpenDoors maintains is an Employment Program for both incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals. Using participant observation, Buxton will look at the different strategies that are used in order to prepare women for employment both before and after being released from prison. Buxton will use data collected from formal interviews with incarcerated individuals, previously incarcerated individuals and OpenDoors Staff, in tandem with a critical overview of the scholarly literature. One of the facets of the research is to uncover how access to housing, educational training, mental health services and community support networks affect one’s ability to obtain and maintain a job. The research will illuminate the deeply historical, economic and social processes that come into play when policy makers are drafting legislative agendas that are targeted toward improving the quality of life of low-income disenfranchised communities. This case study will not only provide insight into effective approaches towards reducing recidivism rates among women, but will initiate the discussion that needs to take place concerning both the obstacles and the successes that grassroots organizations experience when creating and implementing national policy agendas.

Francesca Inglese
Graduate Student, Department of Music

"Coloured Coons and Klopse Beats: Embodying Contested Subjectivities in Cape Town, South Africa"

Inglese’s dissertation investigates minstrel troupe music and embodied performance as a dynamic site for constituting and negotiating modes of racial subjectivity and gendered identities in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa. Minstrel troupes (known as kaapse klopse in Afrikaans) have been a feature of musical life in Cape Town since the mid-1800s, when white and later black American minstrels toured South Africa. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Inglese focuses on informal debates around minstrel sound and style; public performances grounded in countermemories of removal, dispersal, and marginalization; and the transmission of embodied practices in emerging youth development projects. She analyzes how these sonic and embodied practices serve as sites on which stereotypes of “colouredness” are debated and reworked, both cohering and contesting race and gender ideologies grounded in global-local histories, and remapping Cape Town’s urban geography through expressive practice. Her goal is to reveal how, through performance, musical sounds and embodied gestures become public acts that enable participants to critically revisit and revise the significance and relevance of apartheid’s racial categories and dominant gender ideologies in the new South Africa.

Bryan Knapp
Graduate Student, Department of History

“From Women’s Health to World Health: The Politics of Infant Formula, World Hunger, and Corporate Accountability, 1968-1981”

Knapp’s dissertation explores the global intimate politics and particular site of struggle that existed at an infant suckling her mother’s breast. The Nestle Boycott and the infant formula controversy of the 1970s and early 1980s resides at the center of Knapp's research. Activists in the United States developed global social justice networks and constructed professional organizations to address what they perceived as pressing problems of world hunger, environmental degradation, and corporate malfeasance.

The activists posed questions especially criticizing notions of free markets and total growth in what they saw as an age of limits. They also critiqued corporate and institutional assumptions about women’s bodies, breastfeeding decisions, and reproductive choice. These issues, too, existed at the heart of actual struggles for survival – for individuals, families, and even the entire species. Additionally, women in the developing world desired their own agency within complicated networks of “expert” opinions, whether from western doctors, corporate marketing, or international policymakers.

Through Knapp's case study of the infant formula marketing and world hunger campaigns, he poses questions about the “health” of the body and the “health” of the economy through Western paternalistic images broadcast throughout the world, especially within the World Health Organization. This particular framing helps develop his inquiry into “world health,” and how its conceptual and organizational apparatus was imagined. At the same time, individuals in the United States, Asia, Europe and Africa battled, agitated, and negotiated with these corporate, state and international institutions to create new social, political and cultural realms.

The Helen Terry MacLeod Research Grant

The MacLeod grant supports undergraduate honors research on issues having to do with women or gender, or research that brings a feminist analysis to bear on a problem or set of questions. Students currently working on honors theses in any field are eligible to apply. The $1000 grant is to be used to further research.

Application materials should include:

• a three to five page description of your honors thesis
• a letter of support from your thesis advisor
• a brief description of how you would use the grant funds, if awarded

The grant honors the life of Helen Terry MacLeod (1901-1994) who did not herself have a college education but who helped support the undergraduate, graduate, and professional school educations of her grandchildren, including Joan MacLeod Heminway ’83.

View a list of all Helen Terry MacLeod Research Grant recipients

2012-13 Helen Terry MacLeod Research Grant Recipient

Catharine Savage '13
History, Gender and Sexuality Studies

“The Personal is Academic: Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University”

Catharine Savage’s thesis in the History Department analyzes how areas of study like Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies have attempted to reconcile their activist roots with a history of patriarchal elitism in American universities. Given its reputation for progressivism and its active pursuit of academic research on issues of political activism, Catharine will use Brown University as a specific case study of these academic endeavors in American universities. Catharine is particularly interested in the relationship between “the self” and “the academic” within these areas of study. She looks to examine their reference to self-empowerment in their pedagogy, scholarship, and justification for their existence as a means to re-orient the purpose of university education toward self-actualization. How does focus on self-empowerment link to collective (political) empowerment? How did founders of these areas of study make the personal academic? How did they make the academic political? Catharine will incorporate personal testimonial into her own study by conducting interviews with founding alumni, faculty, and staff. In addition, she will use Brown University Archives—the Pembroke Center Archives in particular—to understand the relationship between these areas of study and the institution of Brown University.

From 1995-2007 the Pembroke Center awarded Helen Terry MacLeod funds as a 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.

The Barbara Anton Internship Grant

Undergraduate students doing an honors thesis involving an internship or volunteer work in a community agency are eligible to apply for the Barbara Anton research grant. The thesis and community work must be in some way related to the welfare of women and children, and the $1000 grant used to further research.

Application materials should include:

• a three to five page description of your honors thesis
• the name of the community organization with which you are working
• a letter of support from your thesis advisor
• a brief description of how you would use the grant funds, if awarded

The grant commemorates Barbara Anton’s many contributions to the Pembroke Center over nearly two decades as director of the Pembroke Associates organization.

View a list of all Barbara Anton Internship Grant recipients

2012-13 Barbara Anton Internship Grant recipient

Julia Ellis-Kahana, '13
Sociology

"Sailing a Social Movement into a Social Nonmovement: A Case Study of Self-Empowerment for Safe Abortion in Morocco" 

 Julia Ellis-Kahana is a senior concentrating in sociology with a particular focus on human sexuality and social movement theory. During her time studying abroad in Amsterdam in the fall of 2011, she began interning for an international non-governmental organization called Women on Waves. This group promotes abortion access and reproductive health services to women all over the world, primarily through public direct action strategies. Under the mentorship of Rebecca Gomperts, MD, MPP, the founder and director of Women on Waves, Julia has gained experience working at the intersection of politics, women’s health, and human rights activism. Julia’s undergraduate honors thesis will explore the recent ship campaign of Women on Waves in Morocco, a project completed in collaboration with a Moroccan organization called Mouvement Alternatif pour les Libertés Individuelles (M.A.L.I.). She will use this action as a case study to illustrate that a social movement for safe abortion can in fact inform and incite social nonmovement, within the particular political and cultural context of Morocco.

The Linda Pei Undergraduate Research Grant

First awarded in 2008, the Linda Pei Undergraduate Research Grant supports an undergraduate research project related to issues of women’s empowerment such as gender equality in the workplace, access to reproductive health care, and women's political leadership. Research projects related to women in developing countries, such as micro-finance and access to education will also be considered. The $1000 grant is to be used to further research.

Application materials should include:

• a three to five page description of your research project
• a letter of support from your advisor
• a brief description of how you would use the grant funds, if awarded

The grant honors the life of Linda Pei ’67 (1944-2007). Linda was born in China and grew up in Tokyo. Her parents sent her to the United States for schooling at the age of sixteen. She graduated from Brown with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, earned a master’s degree in teaching from Wesleyan University, and completed a master’s degree in business administration at Stanford University. She founded the Women’s Equity Mutual Fund in 1993 to advance the social and economic status of women in the workplace by bringing to bear the collective power of individual and institutional investors. She also founded a program to integrate entrepreneurial learning and microfinance in a small community in China.

Click here for a list of all Linda Pei Research Grant recipients

2012-13 Linda Pei Undergraduate Research Grant recipient

Kenna Hawes'13
Community Health; Music Theory and Composition

“Restoring a Culture of Respect: Community Perspectives on Addressing Intimate Partner Violence on American Indian Reservations”

Kenna Hawes' honors thesis explores the high prevalence of intimate partner violence on many American Indian reservations from the perspective of people who work in these communities as program directors, law enforcement officials, legislators, and local leaders. Many theories have been put forward to explain why intimate partner violence occurs at such high rates on so many reservations, but voices from reservations themselves are notably absent from much of this discussion.

Through interviews with key stakeholders who are working to prevent intimate partner violence in reservation communities across the country, Hawes will investigate how people in these communities conceptualize and regard intimate partner violence. She is exploring what causal factors community experts associate with high rates of violence and what measures they suggest to effectively address the issue. In light of the recent congressional debate over the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, Hawes is interested in community experts’ thoughts on where change is rooted. Should violence be addressed through federal funding? Through law enforcement efforts? Through cultural tradition-centered community outreach?

Drawing from concerns and suggestions expressed during these interviews, Hawes will create a list of recommendations of viable practices for addressing reservation intimate partner violence at the community and federal levels. Through the dissemination of these recommendations, Hawes hopes to foster connections between those working toward justice and peace on many different reservations.