WGS has a whole lot to celebrate in Spring 2016!

Join us in congratulating department faculty, staff, and students on a range of awards, prizes, and accomplishments over the past year! 

  • PhD Candidate Rosemary Ndubuizu was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, which will award her a year's worth of funding to finish her dissertation!
  • Professor Carlos Decena was selected by the Rutgers University Committee to Advance our Common Purposes (CACP) to receive a Leaders in Faculty Diversity Award for 2016! Professor Decena is being honored for his work in advancing the boundaries of interdisciplinary scholarship and research in Ethnic, Queer, and Spiritual Studies; for his leadership in Latino Studies at the national level; and for his international collaborations as a Fulbright specialist in Women's Studies at the Centro Latino-Americano de Economía Humana and between the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Institute for Research on Women (IRW), Rutgers University.
  • Professor Mary Hawkesworth and WGS Administrative Staff Monique Gregory and Suzy Kiefer were the recipients of this year's Ernest McMahon Class of 1930 Award. This award is given for work which extends the mission of the university to the state of NJ. Mary, Monique, and Suzy were awarded the prize for their exemplary work in establishing and promoting our National Nurses United Certificate Program in Women's Global Health Leadership.
  • Professor Nikol Alexander-Floyd received the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) Presidential Award and was awarded a 2015 Hight Summer Writing Fellowship in Orlando, Florida. 
  • Professor Ethel Brooks received a US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair. She will be affiliated with TrAIN, the TransnationalCenter for Art, Identity and Nation, and CCW, the Chelsea-Camberwell-Wimbledon Graduate School. She also received a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Networking Grant and will serve as Co-Investigator in the project “Performing Romani Identities as Strategy and Critique,” with Jane Collins, University of the Arts London. 
  • WGS Department Chair and Professor Abena Busia was awarded, with Professor Ousseina D. Alidou, a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship for collaborative research, training, and co-curricular development and other capacity building projects at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria.
  • Professor Radhika Balakrishnan was awarded grants from the Ford Foundation and an anonymous foundation for the continued work of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership. She was also awarded a Palestinian American Research Council fellowship to go to Jerusalem and the West Bank as a part of a scholar exchange with Palestinian academics in May 2015, and she was selected to serve a two‐year term as a Commissioner for Gender Equity by Mayor de Blasio for the City of New York, June 2015 ‐ June 2017. Finally, Professor Balakrishnan was appointed Co-Chair of the Civil Society Advisory Committee for the United Nations Development Program.
  • Professor Alison Bernstein was elected Life Trustee of the Samuel Rubin Foundation.
  • Professor Charlotte Bunch received the CUNY (City University of New York) School of Law Dean’s Award, March 11, 2015.
  • Professor Susan J. Carroll is serving as Co-principal Investigator in the project “Women Representing in an Era of Polarization,” which was funded by a grant to the Center for American Women and Politics from the Hunt Alternatives Fund in the amount of $400,000 for the period of 2015-17. She also received a Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies Award from the Political Studies Association (United Kingdom) in 2014. 
  • Professor Sylvia Chan-Malik was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Scholar in Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
  • Professor Brittney Cooper was awarded the Darwin T. Turner prize for best published article on African American Literature in 2014 in the African American Review. She was also awarded the National Organization of Women's Olga Vives Award for "extraordinary accomplishments as co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, educator, and advocate for women and men of color." This award will be conferred in June.
  • Women's Studies Librarian Kayo Denda is the 2016 winner of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Women and Gender Studies Section (WGSS) Career Achievement Award. The award honors significant long-standing contributions to womens studies in the field of librarianship over the course of a career.
  • Professor Judith Gerson was invited to be the (U.S.) Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for the 2017 - 2018 academic year.
  • Professor Julie Rajan, Visiting Scholar, GEMMA Erasmus Mundus Program, 2016, will be visiting Italy and Poland to study the rise of Islamaphobia in these spaces in accordance with her work on the Islamic State. 
  • Professor Joanna Regulska received one of Poland's highest merit awards, the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, for contributions to building local democracy and civic society after 1989 in Poland, advancing the place of women in politics, and strengthening international cooperation, through both research and service. 
  • The 2016 Northeast Assosication of Graduate School Awards recognized two WGS faculty in 2016: Brittney Cooper won their Award for Master's level teaching and Jasbir Puar won their Award for Doctoral level teaching. 
  • The Graduate School of New Brunswick awarded Carlos Decena their Teaching Award and Monique Gregory their Staff Excellence Award! 

Please join us in congratulating the WGS community on these amazing accomplishments!