Gender News

The Clayman Institute announces 2011 Lozoff and Yalom prize winners

by admin on 04/25/11 at 9:32 pm

The Clayman Institute is pleased to announce the winners of two awards for Stanford graduate students: the Marjorie Lozoff Graduate Essay Prize and the Marilyn Yalom Research Fund award. These competitive prizes support current scholarship on women and gender.

Marjorie Lozoff Graduate Essay Prize

The Marjorie Lozoff Graduate Essay Prize promotes scholarship in areas that further women’s development. This prize honors the memory of Marjorie Morse Lozoff (September 30, 1916 – April 18, 2002). 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. This year’s winning essay offers an historical perspective on a pressing current issue: the underrepresentation of women faculty.

The Clayman Institute and Lozoff family awarded the 2011 prize to Scott Spillman, for his article, “Institutional Limits: Christine Ladd-Franklin, Fellowships, and American Women’s Academic Careers, 1880-1920.” In his article, Scott Spillman shows how the professionalization of American higher education opened new opportunities for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it also allowed for the institutionalization of new forms of hierarchy and exclusion that would take decades to overcome. The prize winning essay focuses on the pioneering work of one woman, Christine Ladd-Franklin, who tried to increase the representation of women faculty in American universities. The essay was recently accepted for publication by History of Education Quarterly.

Scott Spillman is a doctoral candidate in History at Stanford University. He studies American intellectual history, with particular interests in education, liberalism, and slavery. His dissertation, “Slavery and Progress: The Origins of Slavery Studies in America, 1750-1950,” will examine ideas about slavery’s relationship to social and economic progress as they developed from eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers to twentieth-century American academics. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008.

The Marilyn Yalom Research Fund

The Marilyn Yalom Research Fund supports Stanford doctoral candidates working in the humanities on issues concerning women and gender. Dr. Yalom has been part of the Clayman Institute since 1978, having served as both Associate Director and Acting Director. She is currently a Senior Scholar, and is well known as an internationally acclaimed historian of women’s and gender issues.

Yvon Wang won this year’s Marilyn Yalom Research Fund award to support research for her dissertation, “Protecting the Hearts of the People: Sex, Media, and State in China, 1875-1927.”Despite the fact that China has the world’s oldest print tradition and an even longer history of discourse about sexual pleasure, we have yet to understand how depictions of sex in print played a part in Chinese culture, politics, and society. Yvon Wang’s dissertation will investigate the cultural and political impact of pornography during the late Qing period and early Chinese Republic.

The Yalom award will support Yvon Wang’s archival research in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan in 2011-12. In Beijing, Wang will concentrate on local police and court records at the First Historical Archives and Beijing Municipal Archives, which contain rules for police officers, suspects’ testimonies, and lists of confiscated items. In Taipei, she will conduct research at the Academia Sinica’s Fu Ssu-nien Library, whose unparalleled collection of original late Qing and early Republican popular literature includes many of the same “pornographic” originals books, pamphlets, and images that were impounded and burned by policemen in Beijing. Wang will use a wide variety of historical evidence, from police records to popular paperbacks, to show how ideal norms of gender and sexuality collided with the ordinary lives and desires of men and women during an age of political and social transformation.

Yvon Wang is a doctoral candidate in History at Stanford University. She received her bachelor’s degree in History, with a minor in Creative Writing and East Asian Studies from Princeton University.