Shanti Pepper is a doctoral candidate in Counseling Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. She is involved with many projects, including a grounded theory study of multicultural development in counselors, an investigation of the purpose and function of relationship role models for the lesbian community, and a book chapter that explores approaches to fostering a climate for diversity for LGBT individuals in schools and in the workplace. She also recently submitted a manuscript for publication that addressed workplace concerns and obstacles faced by transsexual individuals. Shanti has been a member of PSU’s Counseling Psychology department’s LGBT research team for three years. Recent projects include an APA symposium on affirmative LGBT mentoring, as well as serving as a student editor for the Handbook of Counseling and Psychotherapy with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Clients (Bieschke, Perez, & DeBord, 2007). Her dissertation research focuses on the role of self-efficacy beliefs in lesbian women’s romantic relationships. Specifically, the purpose is to develop and validate an instrument to assess the sources (i.e., past performance, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and emotional arousal) of lesbian women’s relationship self-efficacy and its effects on relationship satisfaction.  

Christine M. Robinson is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Liberal Studies at James Madison University. Her sociological study, The Web: Social Control in a Lesbian Community, examines the effects of intracommunity relations of power and informal social control in a lesbian community in the Midwest. Robinson articulates how the dynamics of social interaction are shaped by the larger social context of heteronormativity and heterosexism, affecting intracommunity social and sexual relations and political alliances. Social Control in a Lesbian Community will be published by University Press of America in 2007. Dr. Robinson’s current research is a sociological study of the global ex-gay movement.  

(Honorable Mention)
Lynn Horridge is a PhD student in cultural anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her project, entitled “Lesbian Adoption in New York City: Making an American Family”, examines the social and structural variables influencing lesbian adoption in the U.S. Specifically, this research investigates the ideologies that inform the adoption process and the social construction of the American family. An explicitly gendered focus will direct interviews and data collection in the hopes of documenting contrasts between the experiences of gay women and men as they work to build families through adoption.

2005:
Amy Steinbugler is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Temple University. Her dissertation, entitled “‘Race Has Always Been More Than Just Race’: Gender, Sexuality and the Negotiation of Race in Interracial Relationships”, considers how queer and heterosexual black-white interracial couples experience racial difference in their relationship. Situating her research at the intersection of racial, gender and sexual identities, Steinbugler explores the empirical and theoretical void created when scholars of race assume that interracial intimacy is heterosexual and sexuality scholars assume that queer intimacy is monoracial. She seeks both to illuminate queer interraciality as a productive site for analyzing intersecting identities and power structures and to problematize the normative heterosexual framework through which interracial sexuality has traditionally been examined.

Tim Retzloff is an undergraduate student of non-traditional age in the History Honors Program at the University of Michigan, where he works full time as a supervisor at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library. His research on various aspects of Michigan queer history has appeared in GLQ, The Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America, the anthology Creating a Place for Ourselves, and the newspaper Between The Lines, for which he served as assistant editor in the mid-1990s. He is also the online curator of the web exhibit Artifacts and Disclosures: Michigan's LGBT Heritage. Retzloff's project looks at suburbanization and the growth of visible lesbian and gay communities in postwar Detroit, examining how the urban/suburban divide in and around the Motor City served to partition sexuality as well as race and class.

(Honorable Mention)
Ellen Herman received a Heller-Bernard honorable mention for her project “Toward a History of Gay Kinship in the United States: The Case of Child Adoption in the Early Twentieth Century.” The project is a study of same-sex couples and gay individuals in modern child adoption prior to the 1970s. Herman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon.

2004:
Sarah Stanton is a Ph.D. Candidate in Women’s Studies at Emory University.  She is currently at work on her dissertation entitled “Discretion and Disclosure: (Re)constructing Women’s Queer Identities in the Deep South.” Her project seeks to situate the experiences and constructions of southern women’s queer desires and identities within broader discussions of the history of sexuality in the U.S.  At Emory University she is a Woodruff Library Graduate Fellow in LGBT Studies and teaches Queer Identities and Women's Studies courses.

Gayatri Reddy is an Assistant Professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Emory University in 2001 with a dissertation entitled "With Respect to Sex: Charting Hijra Identity in Hyderabad, India," an anthropological study of the hijras, better known as the “third sex” of India.   Her proposed project, entitled “Desi, Pardesi: Crafting Gay South Asian Spaces in the Contemporary U.S.A,” focuses on the narratives and life histories of diasporic South Asian gay-identified men. 
 

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