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Chavez Wins Women's Studies Fellowship
Occidental College graduate Marisela Chavez ’94, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, is among 15 Ph.D. candidates nationwide to receive a grant from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for doctoral dissertations in women’s studies.
The $3,000 award covers travel and research expenses connected to Chavez’s dissertation, which is preliminarily titled “Gender and the Emergence of Chicana Feminisms, 1967-1981.” Chavez plans to consult oral histories, newspapers, journals, visual media and government documents to investigate racial and gender identities that surfaced within the Vietnam War era’s Chicano movement.
“It will be one of the first studies that focuses on Mexican American women in the turbulent era of the 1960s and 1970s,” Chavez said. “It also helps to place Chicana feminist ideology into the wider realm of American feminist history.” She will conduct research at Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collection and the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at UC Santa Barbara.
Chavez graduated from Occidental with degrees in American studies and Spanish. She is an Eagle Rock resident and graduate of Wilson High School.
The Women’s Studies Dissertation Grants, which date back to 1974, have supported more than 450 dissertations since the program’s inception. The program was the nation’s first to support doctoral work in women’s studies and remains the only national grant program of its kind.