Graduate Students & Fellows
- Sam Bergmann
LGSP Hormel Fellow
Sam is an advanced doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Human Development working on a dissertation study of gender roles and identities in the relationships of female couples raising children. He originally hails from Texas and has a B.A. from the University of Texas in the humanities and psychology. Most recently, he has been living in San Francisco conducting interviews and gathering other data, but has now dusted off his long johns and snow boots and returned to Chicago as a Hormel fellow. He plans to graduate in 2007 and to continue advancing toward a license as a clinical psychologist. He is the proud coparent of 2 small terriers desperately in need of remedial training.
- Kristin C. Bloomer
CGS Resident Fellow
Kristin is a Ph.D. candidate in Theology and the History of Religions at the Divinity School whose research focuses on gender, popular religion and contemporary Christianity in Tamil Nadu, south India. Kristin spent two years in south India studying Roman Catholic, Protestant and Hindu communities whose memberships cut across class, caste, and geographic lines, examining in particular these communities' discourses and practices as they pertained to Mary. She sought to analyze the status of Mary in these discourses and practices, the extent to which, if at all, they seemed to correspond to the status of women in these communities, and the extent to which these discourses and practices shared similarities to, or differed from, one another as well as to or from local discourses and practices associated with Hindu goddesses. Her dissertation, an ethnography that locates itself in the developing field of comparative theology, will focus on possession and exorcism rituals involving Mary. It will furthermore seek to examine the status of Mary in Roman Catholic discourse and practice on at least three levels: the level of Vatican elite; the level of Indian Roman Catholic clerical elite; and the level of local Roman Catholics and Hindus who cannot be counted among the elite of Tamil South Indian society.
Kristin graduated from Wesleyan University in 1989, earned an M.A. from King's College, Cambridge University in 1991, and completed an M.F.A. in creative writing from University of Montana in 1993. She worked for several years as a print journalist before moving to Chicago, where in 2000 she earned the Divinity School M.A. that immediately preceded her doctoral work. She reads and speaks Tamil. A Marty Dissertation Fellow at the Divinity School, she will also be teaching at Loyola University this year.
- Jingwoan Chang
CGS Resident Fellow
Jingwoan is a PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations department. She is interested in the cultural history of Ming-Qing China and Tokugawa Japan, and plans to write a dissertation on the role of gender in Edo food culture and food publications. In particular, she will focus on Chinese influences on such texts and examine the gendered discourses tied to bodily appetites, food prohibitions, and culinary manners for women.
Jingwoan was born in Taiwan, raised in Singapore, and has lived in the United States for over sixteen years. A native speaker of English and Mandarin Chinese, she has spent four summers in Japan immersed in language training, research, and gastronomical adventures. The place that has felt most like home has been the San Francisco Bay Area, where she spent a few years working as a technical writer for IBM Corporation. This year, Jingwoan will prepare for qualifying exams and serve as one of the student coordinators for the Literature and Cultural History in Early Modern East Asia workshop.
- Alison Lefkovitz
B.A. Preceptor
Alison is a doctoral candidate in the History department whose research focuses on 20th century United States gender, family, and political history. She is the Gender Studies preceptor for the 2006-2007 academic year.
Her dissertation "The Politics of Marriage in the Era of Women's Liberation, 1963-1982" explores legal, economic, and social changes in marriage from 1963 until the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. She will examine the struggle over personal rather than public life-specifically marriage-as the New Right, feminists, and ordinary couples battled over the meaning, desirability, and means of attaining gender equality. Following archival trips to Boston, MA and Washington DC this past summer, Alison plans to continue writing and researching her dissertation in Chicago this fall.
- Sarah Potter
CGS Dissertation Writing Fellow
Sarah is a doctoral candidate in the History department. She graduated from Columbia University in 1999 and received her MA in History from the University of Chicago in 2002. Sarah's research focuses on gender and sexuality in the twentieth-century United States. Her dissertation, "The Postwar Private Sphere: Social Difference in Daily Life in Chicago, 1940-1960," uses confidential adoption and foster care records from the 1940s and 1950s as a lens into daily domestic life during the baby boom. She seeks to complicate our understanding of the politics and values informing family life at this time by studying a diverse group of African American, working-class, and middle-class families. Sarah has been a part of the Center for Gender Studies for several years, serving as the Gender Studies Preceptor and the graduate student representative for the Gender Studies Student Caucus. This year she plans to complete her dissertation.