The Martin Duberman Fellowship
An endowed fellowship named
for CLAGS founder and first executive
director, this award is given to a
senior scholar from any country doing
research on the LGBTQ experience.
The 2006/07 Duberman fellowship
was awarded to Clare Hemmings,
Senior Lecturer in Gender Theory at
the London School of Economics and
Political Science in the UK. Her project,
“Bisexuality, Transnational Sexuality
Studies and Western Colonial Legacies,”
explores the work that bisexuality does
within the expanding field of transnational
sexuality studies. Clare asks why
it is that bisexuality matters in relation
to dilemmas within the field, particularly
those concerning naming of sexual
practices outside of contexts where
sexual identity categories are readily
available. Her focus is thus not on what
bisexuality is, or which practices, where,
might nestle under the term, but on
what the absence or presence of bisexuality
means for theorists of transnational
sexuality. The work so far has highlighted
ways in which citation of bisexuality
locks transnational queer studies into a
developmental paradigm it might otherwise
wish to challenge.
Joan Heller-Diane Bernard Fellowship
This fellowship supports research
by a junior scholar (graduate student,
untenured university professor or
independent researcher) and a senior
scholar (tenured university professor or
advanced independent scholar) into the
impact of lesbians and/or gay men on
U.S.society and culture. The winner of
the 2006/07 Heller- Bernard Fellowship
for a senior scholar is Benita Roth,
associate professor of sociology and
women’s studies at the State University
of New York at Binghamton. She is
the author of Separate Roads to Feminism:
Black, Chicana and White Feminist
Movements in America’s Second Wave
(Cambridge University Press 2004),
which won the Distinguished Book
Award from the Sex and Gender Section
of the American Sociological Association
in 2006. Her project, Anti-AIDS
Activism from the 1980s to the 2000s: From
Streets to Suits, explores the rise and fall
of one militant anti-AIDS organization,
ACT UP/LA, in order to understand
interrelated questions about lesbian/gay/
bisexual/transsexual identity, activism,
and the institutionalization of LGBT
issues. She has previously published on
ACT UP/LA’s Women’s Caucus, and on
the feminist protest outside and within
institutions.
The Heller-Bernard Fellowship for
a junior scholar was awarded to Shanti
Pepper, 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.
Passing the Torch Award
This award recognizes the achievements
and promise of an emerging
scholar in LGBTQ Studies, chosen by
the CLAGS fellowships committee
from a list of nominations provided by
our national advisory board of distinguished
scholars. This year’s awardee is
Marcia M. Gallo, a lesbian social justice
activist who has taught the history of
sexuality, U.S. and New York history,
and American Studies at Lehman College
for the last three years. She is the
author of Different Daughters: A History
of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of
the Lesbian Rights Movement (Carroll &
Graf, 2006), the first and only fulllength
work to explore the pioneering
American women’s organization. It won
the 2006 Lambda Literary Foundation
Award for LGBT Nonfiction and was a
finalist for the 2006 Publishing Triangle
Judy Grahn Award. Different Daughters
also was named one of the best books
of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Gallo has researched and written about
Cold War women’s history, focusing
on the ways in which women of color,
working and poor women, and sexually
nonconforming women organized for
civil and human rights in the U.S. and
internationally. She is now working on a
book about Catherine “Kitty” Genovese,
who was murdered in Queens, New
York in 1964 and became an international
symbol of urban apathy and the
failure of community.
