Fletcher Family Research Awards - Fall 2006

Charles Dorn, Assistant Professor of Education
“A Woman’s World”: The University of California, Berkeley, During the Second World War
Female students at the University of California, Berkeley, made such significant advances in collegiate life during World War II that male classmates characterized their campus as a “woman’s world.” This study investigates how women constructed that world by taking advantage of wartime opportunities to further curricular and extra-curricular goals, champion strongly held political beliefs, and prepare for roles as employees and engaged citizens.

Meggan Gould, Assistant Professor of Art
Site-seeing: Big Box Landscapes
The integrity of Main(e) Streets, USA, long chronicled via a rich photographic history, is eroding throughout the country, unable to compete with the lure of Big Box suburbs. I am fascinated by the aesthetics of these sprawling, monumental landscapes, by their universal similarities and ostensible lack of regional distinction. What is the place of these mega-stores in our public visual imagination? This award will allow me to plot a course across an ample portion of the United States, beginning to establish a photographic archive of these landscapes.

Stephen Perkinson, Assistant Professor of Art History
The Purchase of Photographic Illustrations for Publication
This award will support the purchase of photographic materials that will serve as illustrations in my book, About Face: The Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France, and in a second, much shorter publication, “Likeness, Loyalty, and the Life of the Court Artist: Portraiture in the Calendar Scenes of the Très Riches Heures,” which is forthcoming in Quaerendo next year.

Irene Polinskaya, Assistant Professor of Classics
The Leasing of Public Land in Ancient Athens: An Epigraphic and Historical Study of Misthoseis
The project consists in the production of a new epigraphic corpus of ancient Greek inscriptions, called misthoseis, from the territory of Attica that deal with the practice of leasing public (predominantly sacred) lands. The final publication will also include extensive epigraphic, lexicographic, and thematic commentaries, and an interpretive historical essay.

Jennifer Scanlon, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies
Gurley Girls: Helen Gurley Brown, Single Girls, and the Contested Nature of Second Wave Feminism
Helen Gurley Brown, celebrated author of the 1962 international bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl, diva of the New York magazine world, and 32-year editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, has been an important and contested figure in the second half of the twentieth century. This book project, which will result in the first scholarly biography of Helen Gurley Brown, explores three issues: the life experiences and contributions of a woman who was both present in and pivotal to crucial moments in recent American history; the nature of “Gurley feminism,” which has largely been overlooked in the history of U.S. feminism; and the ways in which a narrative of Brown’s life and work helps fill in a chronological and ideological gap between the second and third waves of American feminism.