With a large number of qualified and impressive applications to consider, deciding on winners is always a difficult process for the CLAGS fellowship committee. CLAGS is delighted to recognize and support some of the exciting new work being done in the field of queer studies.
We send out special thanks to the generous supporters who helped make these awards possible, particularly CLAGS founder Martin Duberman, David Kessler, Diane Bernard, Joe Wittreich, and all the individual contributors to our fellowships programs.
- Martin Duberman Fellowship
- Joan Heller-Diane Bernard Fellowships
- CLAGS Fellowship
- Kessler Award
- Robert Giard Fellowship
- OutHistory Fellowship
- Student Travel Award
An archive of all previous recipients can be found on each fellowship or award's respective page.
The 2011 Martin Duberman Fellow is Carlos Ulises Decena for "Re-membered Country: Queer Matter, Violence, and Dominican Transnational Cultures."
The 2011 Heller Bernard Fellowshop winners were Margot Weiss for “Visions of Sexual Justice Among Contemporary Queer Activists.”
& Yetta Howard for "for “Ugly Dykes: Pejorative Identities and the Anti-Aesthetics of Lesbianism”.
Archive of past Joan Heller-Diane Bernard Fellowship recipients
Frank Leon Roberts
Towards an Ethics of Affection: Queers of Color, AIDS Activism and the Politics of Belonging
Frank Leon Roberts is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. He received his B.A. in English and African American Studies from NYU’s Gallatin School in 2004. His fields of interest include contemporary African American art; film and video, critical race theory, and queer theory and criticism. He also specializes in issues related to AIDS and queer politics/alternative media. He is currently at work at two research projects: one that examines the ethics of AIDS activism among poor and working class queer men of color in New York City (entitled Towards an Ethics of Affection: Queers of Color, AIDS Activism and the Politics of Belonging) and a second project that focuses on black masculinity and aesthetic unbelonging in post-civil rights African American art (entitled Punks: Blackness and the Politics of 'Passivity'). He is a recipient of the 2009 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Award.
2008 - 2009 CLAGS Fellowship Honorable Mention
Christina B. Hanhardt
“Safe Space”: The Sexual and City Politics of Violence, 1965-2005
The CLAGS Honorable mention goes to Christina B. Hanhardt, an Assistant professor in the Department of American Studies and core faculty in the LGBT Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also editor of the newsletter for the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, an affiliated society of the American Historical Association. Her research focuses on the history of U.S. LGBT social movements and contested urban development. She is completing a book manuscript about gay neigh borhoods and the politics of safety since the 1960s, with a focus on the relationship between activism against violence and the race- and class- stratification of the city. Broadly, it examines the transformation of LGBT politics alongside the popular uptake of neoliberal ideologies during these years. Part of this research was published as “Butterflies, Whistles, and Fists: Gay Safe Streets Patrols and the ‘New Gay Ghetto’ 1976-1981,” Radical History Review, Winter 2008 (100).
Kessler Lecture:
What Can Brown Do For You? Race, Sexuality and the Future of LGBT Politics
Urvashi Vaid is a community organizer, writer and attorney who has been a leader in the LGBT and social justice movements for nearly three decades.
She is Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School.
Vaid is author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation (Anchor, 1996), a political analysis of the U.S. LGBT movement. She is co-editor, with Dr. John D'Emilio and Dr. William Turner, of an anthology on public policy history titled Creating Change: Public Policy, Sexuality and Civil Rights (St. Martin's Press, 2000). Her forthcoming book, Irresistible Revolution: Race, Class and the LGBT Imagination will be published in 2012 by Magnus Books. Vaid is a former columnist for The Advocate, the U.S. national gay and lesbian newsmagazine, and has contributed chapters to a number of books. She lectures extensively on the issues of social justice, civil and human rights and LGBT equality.
Vaid serves on the Board of Directors of the Gill Foundation, which is dedicated to achieving equal opportunity for all, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. She is founder of The Vaid Group, a consulting practice that advises individuals and organizations working to achieve social justice in a wide range of fields.
During the 2010-2011 academic year, Vaid was a Visiting Senior Fellow with the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center's Department of Sociology. From 2005-2010, she served as Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation and the Arcus Operating Foundation, global grant making foundations that support social justice and conservation organizations. From January 2001- August 2005, Vaid was deputy director of the Governance and Civil Society Unit of the Ford Foundation where she directed a national grant making program to strengthen the nonprofit and social justice infrastructure of US civil society.
For more than 10 years, Vaid worked in various capacities at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), the oldest national LGBT civil rights organization; first as its media director (7/86-7/89), then as executive director (8/89-12/92), and as director of its Policy Institute Think-tank (1/97-1/01). From 1983-1986, Vaid was staff attorney at the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she initiated the organization's work on HIV/AIDS in prisons.
Vaid is the recipient of an Honorary Degree from City University of New York, Queens College of Law, as well as awards from SAGE, the National Lesbian and Gay Law Association, American Foundation for AIDS Research (AMFAR), American Immigration Law Foundation, Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), Asian American Legal Defense Fund, the Paul Anderson Prize Foundation, and Lambda Legal.
Vaid is a graduate of Vassar College, and Northeastern University School of Law.
2010 - 2011 Robert Giard Fellowship Winner
The 2011 Robert Giard Fellowship Award winners are Molly Landreth & Amelia Tovey for their project, "Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life In America," a highly accessible, multi-media, multi-platform archive of queer life today, and a glimpse of what may be in store tomorrow.
2008 - 2009 OutHistory Fellowships
Joey Plaster is a freelance journalist and independent scholar. his proposed exhibit, The Polk Gulch History Project, will feature oral history interviews with residents of this San Francisco neighborhood. Plaster argues that the Polk Gulch has been a national destination "for some of the most underrepresented segments of the queer community" including homeless youth, Asian and Latin American immigrants, poor transgendered women, and seniors. As gentrification is currently displacing Polk Gulch's queer residents document their histories and preserve their voices. The Outhistory fellowship will allow Plaster to expand his project using material at San Francisco's GLBT Historical Society, newspapers, diaries and transcriptions of interviews conducted in the 1980's.
Tristan Cabello is a Ph.D. candidate in Northwestern University's History Department. Cabello's proposed exhibit Queer Bronzeville: An Exhibit on Race, Homosexuality and Urban Boundaries in Chicago, will cover fifty years of history in this predominantly black neighborhood. Cabello contends that beginning in the 1930s a "visible and well-accepted queer culture" emerged in Bronzeville. While queers were accommodated in Bronzeville until the late 1940s, they were increasingly persecuted as they became more politically organized. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, they were ignored by both the African American and white-dominated gay media. Cabello will use his OutHistory fellowship to gather materials from archives at the Schomburg Center for African American Research, the GLBT Historical Society, the Library of Congress and Yale University.
2009
Jen Gieseking, a Ph.D. Candidate of Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, was granted the Spring 2009 Student Travel Award for presentation of her paper Constellating an (In)Visible World: Lesbians and Queer Women’s Everyday Places in New York City (1983-2008) at the Association of American Geographers Conference held in Las Vegas, Nevada on March 22nd – 27th, 2009. In her paper, Gieseking drew upon focus groups and mental mapping exercises from women who came out between 1983 and 2008, as well as archival materials regarding lesbians and queer women’s spaces in that period. Future findings will indicate that lesbians’ and queer women’s spaces and places are formed in constellations of physical places, social networks, events, politics, media, and public personalities that individual women link together to actualize their own identities.
2008
Roberto C. Ferrari, a History Student at the CUNY Graduate Center, was granted the Fall 2008 Student Travel Award for presentation of his paper Channeling (Ant)Eros: John Gibson's Queer Sculpture at the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference held at Yale University on NOvember 14-16, 2008. In his paper, Ferrari examined some of John Gibson's classical subjects, such as the group Mars Restrained by Cupid (c.1820) and single figures such as Love Tormemting the Soul (1839). He used Gibson's own writings on ancient Greek love and art to contextualize how Gibson used his neoclassical origins to adumbrate the burgeoning homosexual identity seen in later Victorian art.
