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.

Shawnie is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo. Her work focuses on waste, labor, and urban environmental politics, drawing on urban political ecology, feminist approaches to labor and social reproduction, labor geography, and discard studies. Her ongoing research examines how circular-economy reforms and the formalization of recycling are reshaping urban waste regimes, informal labor, and socio-spatial relations in urban China. Before coming to UB, she studied Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo and later completed a master’s degree in Sustainable Development, with a specialization in Space and Society, at KU Leuven.

Her doctoral dissertation explores how the modern circular-economy transition is transforming urban recycling systems and the labor that sustains them. Focusing on household waste recycling in Shenzhen, China, the project examines how tech-centric green development and recent formalization efforts are reshaping an existing waste regime built on informal networks, family-coordinated labor, and migrant workers’ embodied labor and knowledge, under the conditions of uneven access to social resources. The project draws on feminist approaches, particularly social reproduction, alongside broader debates in urban political ecology and discard studies, to understand how responsibilities for paid and unpaid labor, care, and cleanliness are being reconfigured across households, workplaces, and everyday infrastructures. In doing so, it highlights the hidden labor and uneven socio-spatial relations that underpin contemporary visions of sustainability.

2025
Senay Imre, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
Project: A Feminist Ethnographic Inquiry into Anatolian Women’s Cultural Production: Crafting Culture, Identity, and Memory in Turkey

2024
Anupriya Pandey, Sociology
Project: Locating Gender in Caste Ecologies: Dalit Women Negotiating “Freedoms” within the Pesticide Nexus in India. 

2023
Gabriela Cordoba Vivas, Media Studies
Project: ‘Gender Ideology’ as Performance. The Global Right and the Trans*feminist Response” 

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"