Three Rutgers Doctoral Candidates Awarded Fellowships by Woodrow Wilson Foundation

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Three accomplished scholars pursuing doctorates at Rutgers’ Graduate School-New Brunswick in history, political science and women’s and gender studies have been named winners in two major fellowship programs administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton.

Rebecca Tuuri, a doctoral candidate in history, has been named a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow, while Kelly Dittmar, a Ph.D. candidate in political science, and Bahia M. Munem, a Ph.D. candidate in women’s and gender studies, received 2010 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowships.

"We are enormously proud of these students, who have won prestigious awards in the most competitive national programs,” said Harvey Waterman, associate dean for academic affairs at the graduate school. “They reflect the high quality of our doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences and their substantial contributions to knowledge and understanding."

A native of New Orleans, Tuuri is one of 20 doctoral candidates in their final year of dissertation work selected for the award. This year’s winners were chosen from a record pool of 670 applicants at 18 institutions nationwide. Newcombe winners each receive $25,000 for the completion of their dissertations.

Tuuri’s dissertation, “To Build Bridges of Understanding: the Activist ‘Female Ethic’ of Wednesdays in Mississippi,” explores how middle-class women of all religions used their class, race and gender to support  the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Her research on middle-class women’s activism has been published or presented at local and national conferences. She has interviewed several historical figures in the civil rights movement, including Dorothy Height, who recently died. At Rutgers, Tuuri has been a fellow at the Institute for Research on Women, and taught seven undergraduate courses. Tuuri graduated magna cum laude from Rice University with a degree in history and studio art.

Dittmar and Munem are among only seven doctoral candidates in the nation to receive the 2010 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowships. Winners receive $2,000 toward expenses connected with their dissertations.

Dittmar, who grew up outside of Chicago, majored in political science, sociology and Spanish at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her dissertation, “Campaigns as Gendered Institutions: Stereotypes and Strategy in Statewide Races,” explores the role that gender stereotypes and dynamics play in campaign images, messages and tactics.

“I hope that my findings will demonstrate to what extent female candidates adapt to the masculine norms of U.S. campaigns or, instead, challenge their prescriptions for strategy and behavior,” she wrote in her abstract.

Munem, who was born in Brazil and spent most of her childhood in Paterson, majored in political science and women’s studies at Rutgers-Newark and received a master’s in communication from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her dissertation, “Expulsions and Receptions: Palestinian Refugees Find Belonging in the Brazilian Nation-State,” traces the resettlement and community-building efforts of Muslim Palestinians in São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. The country, which, she notes, “is Latin America’s largest democracy and a self-proclaimed racial democracy,” resettled 108 Muslim Palestinian refugees in 2007, displaced as a result of the Iraq war.

Her dissertation, which includes research on “refugees, migration, diaspora, gender studies and the changing meanings of racial democracy in the Brazilian nation … will provide new understandings of gendered agency and forced transnational migration,” she said.

The women’s studies fellowships are funded by the Ford Foundation, the Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Endowment and private donors. The program has supported more than 500 Ph.D.s in various fields. The roster includes a Pulitzer Prize winner, two MacArthur Fellows, 14 Guggenheim Fellows and a number of Fulbright Fellows.

Founded in 1945, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation identifies and develops leaders and institutions to address the critical challenges in education.