ISABEL S. MARCUS INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

Established in 2012 to honor the distinguished contributions to research and education on women and gender of Professor Isabel S. Marcus, co-founder and co-director of the Gender Institute (1997-2003) and recipient of UB's 2012 Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Education, the Gender Institute's Isabel S. Marcus International Research Fellowship is awarded to outstanding UB graduate students to support and encourage research about women outside of the United States. Competition is open to all graduate students but advanced projects are particularly welcomed.

Recent projects include a study of ‘care work’ among migrant women workers in Lebanon; research at the Jamaican Memory Bank, an audio archive in Kingston that includes interviews of women who belonged to the religious movement known as Bedwardism; a study of contemporary coalition-building among Kurdish and Turkish women; research on gender inequity in the Polish civil service.

The Office of the Vice-Provost for International Education will be cosponsoring the fellowship providing additional funds. We are very grateful for their support of this important research opportunity.  

Isabel S. Marcus International Research Fellowship Applications are due February 12, 2024.

Application Information

Applications must include:

1. Abstract summarizing your research project (e.g., your dissertation) and your plans for fieldwork and/or travel to archives and/or other research methodologies (500 words)
2. Provide a four page (double-spaced) application statement, including: description of the dissertation, its intellectual contributions, plans for the fellowship year, and a timetable for completion.
3. Resume or CV
4. Two letters of recommendation (Recommendations are sent directly from faculty member to the Scholarship Portal.)

Supplemental questions:

1. Are you a graduate student at UB working on a research project about gender and/or sexuality in an international context?
2. Have you passed your department’s proposal defense?
3. Is your project at an advanced stage of research?

The Gender Institute must be acknowledged in any publications or exhibitions that are enabled or enhanced by the fellowship.

Applications should be completed on the UB Scholarship Portal.

Criteria of Evaluation:

1. Applicants must show a commitment to research on gender and/or sexuality in an international context.
2. Applicants should demonstrate that they have passed the proposal defense stage.
3. Priority will be given to students at an advanced stage of their projects.
4. Applicants must show evidence of academic excellence.
5. Priority is given to applicants with a well-articulated project and research goals.
6. Review committee places importance on letters of recommendation.

Congratulations to 2023 Fellow: Gabriela Cordoba Vivas

PhD Candidate, Media Studies

A smiling woman with dark, curly hair.

Gabriela Cordoba Vivas, Department of Media Studies

Gabriela's dissertation argues that far from constituting simply a rhetorical resource, the use of ‘gender ideology’ by the global right is a performative propaganda enterprise that propagates, mobilizes, agitates and organizes right-wing bases through media and incarnated practices. Her thesis ‘Gender Ideology’ as Performance. The Global Right and the Trans*feminist Response” analyzes examples of ‘anti-gender’ and transfeminist embodied gestures, campaigns and protests that (1) act locally and think globally, (2) use and subvert the vocabulary associated with critical theory; and (3) appropriate strategies of critical art practices. 

The Isabel S. Marcus International Research Fellowship will allow Gabriela to ground her research in Colombia and Spain, and in that process get to know activists and academics that are tirelessly working to confront the right-wing agenda in the Spanish speaking world. She believes that the most important part of research besides the strictly academic process is to create professional and personal networks of care, research and activism. She hopes to serve as a bridge between the US and Spanish and Colombian academic traditions regarding the study of counter movements and the far- right.

Former Fellows

2022
Victoria Nachreiner, 
History
Project: "A Marriage of Aesthetics: Afropolitan Consumption, Bodily Practices, and Cis-Atlantic Gendering in Old Calabar, 1840-1940"

2021
Marta Aleksandrowicz
, Comparative Literature
Project: “Flight, Cockroach, and the Maid: Toward a New, Feminine Universal in Olga Tokarczuk, Clarice Lispector, and Gloria Anzaldúa”

2020
Azalia P. Muchransyah
, Media Study
Project: aims to illuminate the status of media activism, especially documentary film, in contemporary Indonesia as well as to explore the potential of documentary media to contribute to the transformation of HIV activism and advocacy in the face of the paradoxes around HIV/AIDS in key population members related to Indonesian prisons.

2019
Gabriella Nassif, Gobal Gender & Sexuality Studies
Project: centers on migrant domestic workers in Lebanon &
Alexandra Prince, History
Project:concerns the history of the turn of the 20th century Jamaican religious movement known as Bedwardism

2018
Elif Ege
, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
Project: "Feminist Intimacies around International Mechanisms: Pitfalls of Feminist Coalition-Building between Kurdish and Turkish Women in Turkey" &
Karolina Kulicka, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
Project: "'The Problem That Has No Name:' Mechanisms of Organizational Gendering in the Polish Civil Service."

2017
Natalia Pamula
, Comparative Literature
Project: "Collective Intimacy and the Promise of Invulnerability: Representations of Disability in Polish Literature, 1945-1989"

2017 Solidarity Fellowships
Elif Ege, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
Project: how Kurdish women construct transnational connections at a local level &
Karolina Kulicka, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
Project: gender in Polish bureaucracies 

2016
Anne Marie Butler
, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
Project: "Unintelligible Bodies: Queerness in Contemporary Tunisian Art"

2015
Mehwish Sarwari, Political Science
Project: "UN Responsivness to Wartime Sexual Violence"

2014
Salwatura Prabha Manuratne, English 
Project: "Modern Incarnations of Figures of Violence in Asian and Asian Canadian Literature and Film"

2013
Eman Abu-Sabah, Nursing 
Project: "Jordanian Health Care Providers' Responses Toward Intimate Partner Violence"