Current Graduate Dissertation Fellows, 2009-10
Gabriela Calderon (Economics) is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Stanford. Her current research focuses on identifying factors that can explain the low productivity of low income women entrepreneurs. Identifying these factors has important policy implications. Understanding the underlying cause of these inefficient decisions can inform social outreach programs run by both governments and non-governmental agencies throughout the developing world. Gabriela, working with her advisor, Prof. Giacomo De Giorgi (Stanford Dept. of Economics), and co-author, Jesse Cuhna, will test whether the lack of a specific type of knowledge - profit-maximizing business practices - is impeding growth for enterprises run by poor women in developing countries. She will also focus on identifying and testing cultural constraints that might impede the performance of low income female entrepreneurs. Gabriela will be using her fellowship to run a field experiment in Zacatecas, Mexico. (gabcal at stanford dot edu)
Kiri Heel (Musicology) is working on a doctoral dissertation project that situates the life, career, and reception of twentieth-century French composer Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) amid broader social contexts. In particular, Kiri examines how Tailleferre and her works functioned within specific musical communities. Focusing on the male-dominated musical world of Paris of the 1910s and 1920s, she examines how Tailleferre negotiated between her gender, personal life, and career during a time when the "new woman" faced challenges for eschewing her traditional domestic role in favor of professional pursuits. She also considers a more recent surge in interest for Tailleferre's works since the 1970s, epitomized by performances of Tailleferre's music by the (Bay Area) Women's Philharmonic (1981-2004), and indicative of a growing interest in the music of women composers in general. More broadly, this dissertation project serves as a case study to illuminate the changing circumstances of female composers over the course of the twentieth century. Kiri spent time researching in Paris during the summer of 2008 and will likely return in 2009. She is also currently a Ric Weiland Graduate Fellow.
(kheel at stanford dot edu)
Ramah McKay (Anthropology) holds a BA in Anthropology from Barnard College and an MA in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University. Her dissertation is based on two years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Maputo City and Zambezia Province, Mozambique. Her research examined how transnational humanitarian and philanthropic medical interventions are producing and transforming possibilities for social welfare for women, children, and families in Mozambique. Her dissertation, Affective Interventions: Making Medical Welfare in Mozambique, asks how these emergent modes of intervention and support are constituted in and through discourses of raced and gendered social difference.
(ramah at stanford dot edu)
Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer (Sociology) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. Her research explores the relationship between gender, marriage and family, and several behavioral and attitudinal outcomes, such as: employment, health and socio-political attitudes. To analyze these topics, she employs an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon theories and methods from Sociology, Demography, Women's Studies, Economics and Public Health. In her dissertation she analyzes ways in which husbands' influence women's labor force participation, the effect of marriage on obesity by race and gender, and the consequences of women's surname choice in marriage. (eshafer at stanford dot edu)
James Thomas (Art Curator) is working on a doctoral dissertation that deals with a crisis of the body. This crisis began with the onset of modernity, at the dawning of reflexive subjectivity, with an understanding of oneself in relation to a field of objects. These relations are fundamentally problematic, and historically defined according to white Western male terms, where the categorization and ordering of others works to further establish the centrality of male perspectivalism. This centrality comes frequently at the expense of any number of colonized bodies, be they female or otherwise gendered in ways opposed to masculinity, defined as oppositional figures in terms of race or class. Thomas' argument is that this subjectivity reached a condition of profound crisis during the Cold War, as the combined effects of the Vietnam war, the backlash against the civil rights struggle, and the collapse of various utopian visions of the late 1960s all result in an era of dystopic violence, a moment when the above-mentioned terms of subjectivity are contested forcibly. This moment of violence coincides with the dawning of modern emergency medicine, a highly-specialized system of management of the body, which becomes the focal point of Thomas' thesis. (jmerlet at stanford dot edu)
Adrianne Vasey (Immunology) is the Iris F. Litt, M.D., Graduate Dissertation Fellow. Vasey will be Vasey will be working on a new formalized training seminar for graduate students dealing specifically with the issue of dual-career academic couples as an outgrowth of the Clayman Institute's research on Dual-Career Academic Couples in the Academy. While there are numerous preparatory resources available at Stanford for students interested in pursuing academic careers, none of them address the issue of dual-career couples. Given recent research findings by the Clayman Institute that 36% of full-time faculty have partners that are also academics, this dearth of resources tailored for people entering faculty positions as part of a dual-career academic couple leaves the specific issues and needs of a sizable population of job candidates unaddressed. To address this need among graduate students, Vasey will design two workshops: one covering negotiation skills and tactics, and the second focusing on the issues faced by dual-career academic couples. The workshops will be coordinated through the Clayman Institute and will be available to students across all schools and disciplines.
(adrianne at stanford dot edu)
Alessandra Voena (Economics) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. She received her BA in Economics from the University of Torino, Italy. She conducts research on labor economics, the economics of the family and economic history. Her dissertation is on marriage disruption and household intertemporal behavior and analyzes how divorce and widowhood affect women and men's saving and investment decisions. In particular, she is investigating how divorce settlement laws in the US influence couples' incentives to save during marriage and their ability to face the economic costs of divorce. She is also interested in intrahousehold decisions over savings when spouses' life horizons differ and the welfare of surviving spouses in the United States. (avoena at stanford dot edu)
Yeon Jung Yu (Anthropology) is working on her dissertation "Social Networks and Social Capital of Female Sex Workers (FSWs) in China: New Techniques for Studying Marginalized Populations at Risk." In order to map the social networks and measure the social capital of Female Sex Workers (FSWs), largely migrants from rural areas, Yu has conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork in southern China. Since the commercial sex work population is a major reservoir for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), her research will provide a new lens through which epidemiological studies of STDs can be viewed. As the first ethnographic project mapping the social networks of FSWs in China, her project will further contribute to the discourse on contemporary women, family, morality and ethics, migration, post-socialism, and neo-liberalism in China. (yjyu at stanford dot edu)
Graduate Dissertation Fellows 2008-09
Graduate Dissertation Fellows 2007-08
Graduate Dissertation Fellows 2006-07
Graduate Dissertation Fellows 2005-06
Graduate Dissertation Fellows 2004-05