Clayman Institute bestows 2026 Yalom Award and Lozoff Award on three doctoral students

Every year, the Clayman Institute selects outstanding Stanford graduate students to receive the Marjorie Lozoff Award and the Marilyn Yalom award for their gender-related research. Nominations come from Stanford faculty, and award recipients receive funds to support their research.  

Elizabeth Fetterolf and Rachel Bergmann, both doctoral candidates in the Department of Communication, collaborated together on their research and both earned the 2026 Lozoff Award. They explore existing discourses in the so-called online "femosphere" (often compared to the manosphere), in particular a set of popular forums about “looksmaxxing” and the so-called "science of beauty." Bergmann and Fetterolf reveal how participants in these spaces bring together reactionary feminism, genetic fatalism, and neoliberal entrepreneurial logics, contributing to the mainstreaming of reactionary ideas about gender, race, and aesthetics. The nominating faculty member, Associate Professor of Communication Angèle Christin, wrote that their research “has the potential to reshape how we think about contemporary gender norms in online and offline spaces.”

Elizabeth Fetterolf holds an MSc in Sociology from the University of Oxford and a BA from Vassar College. Prior to Stanford, they worked as a pre-doctoral research assistant at Microsoft Research with the Social Media Collective. They are currently conducting ethnographic research on life extension and longevity communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rachel Bergmann uses archival and interpretive methods to research Silicon Valley’s material cultures. Previously, she worked as the pre-doctoral research assistant at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research. She has held visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy in Montreal. She holds a BA&Sc in cognitive science and an MA in communication from McGill University.

The Marjorie Lozoff Award goes each year to a graduate student conducting research on issues related to Lozoff’s interests, including but not limited to, reproductive rights for women, equal rights for women, and protections for women, aging, and the family. Lozoff’s family established the award to honor her many contributions as a wife, mother, sociologist, social worker, teacher, researcher, and community leader.

This year’s Marilyn Yalom award goes to Daniel Koplitz, a PhD candidate in music with a PhD minor in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Their dissertation brings queer theory into conversation with premodern music history to reconsider the formation of musical norms. Examining the Phrygian musical mode as an ethno-sonic trope, the project traces how its associations with instability, deviance, and alterity – registered through sound, discourse, and archival absence – shaped foundational Western concepts of tonal and cultural “home.” The nominating faculty member, Denise Gill, said, “Koplitz's project makes clear contributions to several sub-disciplines in music studies, and their commitment to centering trans studies and queer studies for the study of music history is to be celebrated.”

For the 2026–27 academic year, Koplitz is Howard Mayer Brown Fellow of the American Musicological Society, Goldstein-Taylor Fellow of the Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, and inaugural Dissertation Fellow Affiliate at the Stanford Humanities Center.

The Marilyn Yalom Prize supports currently enrolled Stanford doctoral candidates working in the humanities on issues concerning women and gender. Yalom was a part of the Clayman Institute since 1978, having served as both associate director and acting director. Prior to her death in 2019, she was a senior scholar and a well-known, internationally acclaimed historian of women's and gender issues.