The Department of Gender and Women's Studies will award a Graduate Research Fellowship in the amount of $12,000 for either the Fall or Spring semester. The fellowship carries a tuition and fees waiver. The recipient of the Smalley Fellowship will give a public lecture based on their dissertation research.
Eligibility:
The recipient of the Smalley Fellowship in Gender and Women Studies must be:
- A PhD. student in good standing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign enrolled in a minimum of 12 hours for Fall and Spring semesters.
- Pursuing a graduate minor in Gender and Women's Studies or Queer Studies.
- Currently working on a dissertation that shows promise of making an important and original contribution to the field of Gender, Women's, and/or Sexuality Studies.
- Preference will be given to applicants who are ABD and who are enrolled in LAS Programs, but students from other colleges are eligible to apply.
Questions? Please email Tasha Robles at tmatos@illinois.edu
Application Deadline: March 1
Upload your application materials here.
Past Recipients
2027 Margie Giacalone, Department of Anthropology, "Dissident Languages and Politics of Care in Bolivia."
2026 Robin Turner, Department of French & Italian, "Stigmatized trailblazers to celebrated deviants: Heteronormative Discourses of (homo)sexuality after the Québec Quiet Revolution, 1969-1977."
2025 Aparajita Santra, School of Architecture, "Liminal publics and invisible lives: Exploring the embodied spatial knowledge production of the ‘maids’ of Kolkata, India."
2024 Bri Lafond, Department of English, “Content Creators’ Queer Resistance to Algorithmic Surveillance.”
2023 Jessennya Hernandez, Department of Sociology, “Everyday Latinx Strategies and Embodied Feminist Knowledge Production in Los Angeles."
2022 Catalina Hernandez, School of Art and Design, "String Figuring: A Practice to Witness the Beautiful."
2021 Jingyi Gu, Institute of Communications Research, “Mediating Intimacy and Performing Labour: Gender and Sexuality in Chinese Live/fe Streaming.”
2020 Tiffany Harris, Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, "The South Still Got Something to Say: An Atlanta-centric Analysis of Intergenerational Pedagogies."
2019 Olivia Hagedorn, Department of History, "'Call Me African': Black Women and Diasporic Cultural Feminism in Chicago, 1930-1980."
2018 Rico Kleinstein Chenyek, Institute for Communications Research, "Mediating Medical Alterities: Gendered Indigeneity, Racialization, and U.S. Medicine."
2017 Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza, Anthropology, "The Promise of Intimacy: Gay Filipinos on Mobile Phone Apps in Manila and Los Angeles."
2016 Jean Lee, Department of English, "Kala Pani Discourse, Jahaji-Bhain Poetrics and Double Diasporas."
2015 Melissa Villa-Nicholas, Library and Information Science,“Towards a Critical Latina Technology and Information Studies: Latinas in the Bell System, 1973-1984.”
2014 Dominique C. Hill, Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, "Transgressngroove: An Exploration of Black Girlhood, The Body, and Education."
2013 Megan Condis, Department of English, “The Politics of Gamers: Bodies and Identities in the Age of Digital Media.”
2012 Peter Campbell, Department of Communication, “Queer Epistemologies of Process and Equality: Judicial Fourteenth Amendment Arguments and the Production of Queer Subjects Before the Law.”
2011 Reshmi Mukherjee, Comparative and World Literatures, “’Who Speaks for, with and to Me?’ Subalterneity, Agency, and the Politics of Representation in Postcolonial Women Writers.”
2010 Chamara Kwakye, Educational Policy Studies, “Loud Silence: Learning to Read, Learning to Speak. Life Histories of Black Women in the Academy.”
2009 Natalie Havlin, Department of English. “Cultures of Migration: Race, Kinship and Coloniality in U.S. Print and Visual Culture, 1927-1939.”