Three doctoral students honored with Clayman Institute prizes
The Clayman Institute is proud to honor three exceptional Stanford doctoral students with academic prizes for 2025. Their remarkable research and writing significantly contribute to the field of gender scholarship.
Ayodele Foster-McCray has been awarded the 2025 Marjorie Lozoff Prize for her project exploring the social dynamics, emotional impacts, and ramifications of the Black maternal health crisis in both urban and rural Georgia. Through her fieldwork conducted in Georgia and Florida, she uncovered the vital role of Black women midwives, who extended their healing practices by cultivating vegetables to offer healthier dietary options to women in their communities. By focusing on the health issues faced by rural Black women, Foster-McCray will make a substantial contribution to the study of Black maternal health, a pursuit supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Science Foundation. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology.
The Clayman Institute’s Marjorie Lozoff Prize commemorates the legacy of Marjorie Morse Lozoff, a dedicated sociologist, social worker, educator, researcher, wife, mother, and community leader. Awarded annually, the Lozoff Prize recognizes a graduate student whose research aligns with Lozoff’s interests, particularly in areas such as reproductive rights and equal rights of women. Preference is given to research in the social sciences and the fields of medicine and law.
Vera Geranpayeh has been selected as the 2025 Marilyn Yalom prize winner for her research on representations of female subjectivity and Otherness in German literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Focusing on poetics and narrative form, her work delves into the ways gender operates both thematically and structurally, influencing plot development, disrupting closure, and revealing the limitations of narrative control. Geranpayeh’s dissertation will contribute to feminist literary scholarship, as it establishes a transhistorical framework for understanding how female characters persist as sites of narrative and ideological rupture across genres and time periods. She is pursuing her PhD in the Department of German Studies.
The Marilyn Yalom award is presented annually to a currently enrolled PhD candidate at Stanford working in the humanities on topics related to women and gender. The prize is designed to support original research or cover conference expenses. Yalom was instrumental to the Clayman Institute beginning in 1978, serving as both associate director and acting director. Until her passing in 2019, she was a senior scholar and internationally acclaimed historian of women’s and gender issues, celebrated for her contributions to the field through numerous publications.
Serena Crosson has been awarded the 2025 Myra Strober Prize for an article written during her tenure as a graduate dissertation fellow at the Clayman Institute in the 2024-25 academic year. Her article, titled "Training, demographics among factors contributing to decline in federal worker harassment cases," concerns the work of Professor of Sociology Michael Rosenfeld and his presentation to the faculty research fellows. Rosenfeld shared his finding that two large data sets of federal workers show a significant drop in reported sexual harassment cases; he provided insight into the demographic, legal, and social changes that likely have impacted those rates. Crosson completed her PhD in classics in summer 2025.
The Myra Strober Prize recognizes an engaging, high-quality article written by a graduate or undergraduate student at Stanford for Gender News, the Clayman Institute’s newsletter. Each article is featured on the Institute's website. The award is named after Myra Strober, a renowned labor economist and professor emerit at the School of Education and 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). An accomplished author, she has written several books, including Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought (2010), Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others) (2016), and Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions (2023), co-authored with Abby Davisson.
