Academia

Three doctoral students earn Institute prizes

Reed

In keeping with the Institute’s goals of amplifying gender scholarship and supporting the next generation of gender scholars, the Clayman Institute proudly announces the winners of three annual student prizes. These Stanford doctoral students have demonstrated through their research and writing notable contributions to gender scholarship.

Ruby E. “Lillie” Reed receives the 2022 Marjorie Lozoff Prize for her work in gender-based violence. A medical student and master’s student in epidemiology, Reed has worked on a partnership team between Stanford and the Kenya Medical Research Institute. She studied qualitative perspectives on COVID-19, interpersonal violence, and interventions to improve well-being from adolescent girls and young women from Kisumu, Kenya. Through focus group discussions with adolescent girls and young women, Reed learned more about their experiences with gender-based violence, transactional sex for economic support, difficulty gaining referrals to support organizations, and corruption within the support system—all exacerbated by the pandemic—and their desire to address these challenges through better economic opportunity and support dealing with trauma. 

The Lozoff Prize is given 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, with preference for research in the social sciences and the professions such as medicine and law. This prize of $2000 honors the memory of Marjorie Morse Lozoff. In an extraordinarily productive life as wife, mother, sociologist, social worker, teacher, researcher, and community leader, Marjorie Lozoff served as a model for the idea that most deeply absorbed her: furthering women's development for the benefit of women, men, children, and society. 

obryan
O'Bryan

Joan O’Bryan, a PhD candidate in political science, won the 2022 Marilyn Yalom prize for her research on the ontology of feminist thought leaders. Her research abstract says: “By articulating a typology of patriarchal ontologies and explaining how different feminist thinkers are situated with respect to them, I aim to explain how different scholars diverge, as well as to unearth the various assumptions and premises within their intellectual infrastructures – which in turn has implications for how we evaluate different feminist thinkers.” Specifically, O’Bryan investigates the “origin stories” of patriarchy, or the roots of sexism and misogyny in political and intellectual thought. According to her nominator, Rob Reich, professor of political science and director of the Center for Ethics in Society, O’Bryan’s research goes beyond the theoretical. “The implications of this project also matter a great deal for policy, as the way a problem is perceived directly impacts the types of solutions proposed,” he writes.

The Marilyn Yalom Prize supports currently enrolled Stanford Ph.D. candidates working in the humanities on issues concerning women and gender. It comes with a $1,500 award to support research or conference costs. Yalom played a significant role at the Clayman Institute beginning in 1978, having served as both associate director and acting director. Prior to her death in 2019, she was a senior scholar at the Institute and a well-known, internationally acclaimed historian of women's and gender issues and a prolific author. 

Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti received the 2022 Myra Strober Prize in recognition of her writing during her 2021-22 term as a graduate dissertation fellow at the Institute. Vialle-Giancotti, who recently completed her PhD in French and Italian, won for her Gender News article “You’ve been DARVOed and you don’t even know it,” written about the research of Jennifer J. Freyd, founder and president of the Center for Institutional Courage and professor emerit of psychology at the University of Oregon. Freyd presented her work as part of her term among the Faculty Research Fellows program. Vialle-Giancotti’s article drew high readership on the Institute Web site and drew multiple citations and links online, all for an article written outside of her field. Vialle-Giancotti now works as a lecturer for Stanford’s Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program in Undergraduate Education. 

cynthia
Vialle-Giancotti

 

The Strober Prize honors a popular, high-quality article written by a Stanford graduate or undergraduate student for Gender News, the Clayman Institute’s newsletter. Each article appears on the Institute as well. The $1,500 annual prize is named for Myra Strober, a labor economist and professor emerita at the School of Education and at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University (by courtesy). Strober is the founding director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research (then the Center for Research on Women). She is the author of numerous books, including Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought (2010) and Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others) (2016), as well as the forthcoming Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life's Biggest Decisions (January 2023, co-written with Abby Davisson).