Past Student Award Recipients

Women of Color Caucus/Fountiers Award Recipients

2023 Award Winner
Chia-Hsu Chang
Paper Title: Resistant Un/translatability as a Gate-opener and a Gate-keeper: Contributions to the Development of a Decolonial Methodology for the Politics of Women of Color

2018 Award Winner
Jennifer Cossyleon, Johns Hopkins University
Essay title: Restorative Kinship: Women of Color Transforming Family Relationships through Family-Focused Community Organizing

2017 Award Winner
Peggy K. Lee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Essay title: Care as Infrastructure: Black Feminism and the Burden of Self

2016 Award Winner
Lina Chhun, University of California, Los Angeles
Essay title: Feminist Re-readings and Affective Archives of Violence: Regarding Two Registers of Historical Trauma in the Afterlife of the Cambodian Genocide

2014 Award Winner
Jasmine Nicole Salters, University of Pennsylvania
Essay title: Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues: A Black Feminist Autoethnography of Massage, Surveillance, and the Underground

2013 Award Winners
Karen Hanna, University of California, Santa Barbara
Frances (Reanae) McNeal, Texas Woman’s University
Samantha Schalk, Indiana University
Elena Shih, University of California, Los Angeles

2012 Award Winners
Nazgol Bagheri, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Joelle Cruz, Texas A&M University
Naomi Edwards, Stony Brook University
Gitanjali Singh, University of California, Los Angeles

Trans/Gender-Variant Caucus Award

2023 Award Winner

Sam King-Shaw, A Self-Made Woman, A Woman’s Rights: A Trans Theoretical Reading of the Sojourner Truth Archive

2023 Honorable Mention

Beshouy Botros, Transition and Trans*lation beyond Binary History in Mid-century Upper Egypt; or, Portraits of Transfemininity in Asyut

2019 Award Winner
Cáel Keegan, Grand Valley State University
Paper title: Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?

2019 Honorable Mention
Joy Ellison, The Ohio State University
Paper title: Trans Feminine Feminist and Lesbian Feminist Political Coalitions in the 1970s: Tracing a Midwestern Legacy

2018 Award Winner
alithia zamantakis, Georgia State University
Paper title: "I EXPECT THEM TO TEACH ME": Trans/Nonbinary Negotiations of Gender/Race with Current & Long-Term Intimates

2018 Honorable Mention
T.J. Jourian, Oakland University
Paper title: Who's Trans(*)forming Who?: A Critical Autoethnographic Reflexion on Trans In/Visibility in HESA

Graduate Scholarship Recipients

2023 Winner

Rajorshi Das, Queer and Trans Aspirations: The Messiness of Indian Hindu Exceptionalism

2023 Honorable Mention

Taveeshi Singh, Domestic Exertions: Soldier-Servants, Military Elites, and Securitized Labor in India

2022 Scholarship Recipient
Themal Ellawalla
, University of Illinois at Chicago, Anthropology
Dissertation Title: When Ephemera Bind: On Negative and Positive Space and Queer Relationality in Sri Lanka

2022 Honorable Mentions
Snehal Sharma
, University of Kentucky, Gender and Women's Studies
Dissertation Title: Honor, Holiness and Hate: A Recipe for the Hindu Nation
Holly Genovese, UT Austin, American Studies
Dissertation Title: The South got Something to Say: Aesthetic Resistance to Incarceration in the Black South

2019 Scholarship Recipient
2019 , University of Maryland
Dissertation: Trans Worlding within: Decolonial Examinations of Trans of Color Interiority

2019 Honorable Mentions
Rosanna Simons, Texas Tech University
Dissertation: Documented: Queer Latinx Migrants Refusing Surveillance and Performing Recognition
Kenna Neitch, Texas Tech University
Dissertation: Persistence/Resistance: Gender, Testimony, and Organizing in Central America

2018 Scholarship Recipient
Jallicia Jolly, University of Michigan
Dissertation: I'm Not Sick!': A Critical Embodiment of Illness, Sexuality, & Self-Making among HIV-Positive Jamaican Women

2018 Honorable Mentions
Jaimee Swift, Howard University
Dissertation: On a Black Brazilian Radical Feminist Politics: Afro-Brazilian Women, Police Brutality and Anti-LGBTQ+ Violence in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
Julia Gutierrez, Arizona State University
Dissertation: We identify as poor because of the money we earn not because of the way we live': Perceptions and Experiences of Poverty among Mexican Immigrant Women on the Southwest side of Chicago

2017 Scholarship Recipient
P. Michelle Morado Peters, University of Washington
Dissertation: Past, Present, Pachuca: La Pachuca Sexuality and the Formation of Identity

2017 Honorable Mention
Armaghan Ziaee, University of Cincinnati
Dissertation: Transnational Modernization and the Gendered Built Environment in Iran: Altering Architectural Spaces and Gender Identities in the Early Twentieth Century (1925-1941)
Karen Hanna, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dissertation: Makibaka!: A Feminist Social History of the Transnational Filipina/o American Left From 1969-1992

2016 Scholarship Recipient
Sandibel Borges, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dissertation: Re-Creating Home: The Migration of Queer Latina Women

2016 Honorable Mention
Karen Lawford, University of Ottawa
Dissertation: Understanding the Experiences and Processes of Health Canada’s Evacuation Policy for Pregnant First Nations Women in Manitoba
Abraham Weil, University of Arizona
Dissertation: Trans Versality: Anti Black Racism, Trans Politics and Molecular Revolution

2015 Scholarship Recipient
Elizabeth Verklan, University of Arizona
Dissertation: Objects of Desire: Feminist Inquiry, Transnational Feminism and Global Fashion

2015 Honorable Mention
Krystal Cleary, Krystal Cleary
Dissertation: Mainstream Sideshow: Disability and Freak Discourse in Popular Culture
Cristina Perez, University of Maryland
Dissertation: Bodies on the Line: Violence, Disposable Subjects, and the Border Industrial Complex

2014 Scholarship Recipient
Rosemary Ndubuizu, Rutgers University
Dissertation: Where Shall The Monsters Live? Tracking Undeserving Poor Discourses in Affordable Housing Debates

2014 Honorable Mention
Noralis Rodriguez-Coss, University of Washington
Dissertation: Feminist Street Performances in Puerto Rico: Alternative Imaginaries of the Ideal National Body

2013 Scholarship Recipient
Emek Ergun, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Dissertation: Doing Feminist Translation as Local and Transnational Political Activism: The Turkish Translation and Reception of Virgin: The Untouched History

2012 Scholarship Recipient
Xiumei Pu, University of Minnesota
Dissertation: Decolonizing Knowledge Production: Eco Spiritual Literary Criticism and Literature by Chinese Women in Diaspora

2012 Honorable Mention
Carly Thomsen, University of California, Santa Barbara

Lesbian Caucus Award

2017 Winner
Rachel Stonecipher, University of Pennsylvania
Dissertation:People Change: Fluidity, Difference, Gender, and Race in Lesbian/Queer Futurity

2017 Honorable Mention
Cristina Khan, University of Connecticut

2016
Prize suspended to replenish funds

2015 Winner
M. Prince, University of Maryland, College Park
Dissertation:Collective Difference: Masculine of Center Cultural Production and Preformance

2014 Winner
Jasmine Nicole Salters, University of Pennsylvania
Dissertation:Wild Women Don't Have the Blues: A Black Feminist Autoethnography of Massage, Surveillance, and the Underground

2013 Winner
Elvia Mendoza, University of Texas at Austin
Dissertation:Bodies in Excess: Violence and the Politics of Memory in the Everyday Lives of Queer People of Color

2012 Winner
Dominique Hill, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Dissertation:What Happens in this House, Stays in My Spirit: A Black Girl's Story About Being Schooled

2011 Winner
Megan Rolfe, University of New York, Buffalo

Each year, NWSA in coordination with different NWSA caucuses and publications, offers multiple awards for people who are current members of NWSA. Awardees are announced in the Annual Conference program and are invited to participate in our award recognition event(s) hosted on-site during the conference.

Explore information about our annual Student Awards below!



Donate to Our Student Awards