Women's and Gender Studies has announced the recipients of its 2008 research and teaching awards.

The Josephine Abney Research Award, which includes a cash award of $5,000, is given for research that is cutting edge, women-centered, and grounded in women's studies perspectives. This year two awards were given: to Jeanne Garane, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Culture, and one to Jihong Liu, Arnold School of Public Health, Epidemiology, and Biostatistics, and Kathryn Luchok, Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior.

Garane will complete a book chapter, "Autoethnography as Translation: Pelandrova Dreo's Pelandrova." It is part of a larger work on Francophone Literature and translation, titled Translating Africa: Francophone Literatures and the Transfer of Cultures. The chapter studies the little-known autobiography of a Malagasy woman named Pelandrova Dreo.

Liu and Luchok's project, titled "Developing a Model of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Birth Outcomes: A Life Course Perspective," uses South Carolina data to test the weathering hypothesis, which posits that the health of African American women may begin to deteriorate in early adulthood as consequence of cumulative socio-economic disadvantage, as a paradigm for explaining African American-European American disparities in birth outcomes for South Carolina women.

The Carol Jones Carlisle Award, which includes a cash award of $1,000, is given for women-centered research that is consistent with the research mission of Women's Studies. This year the award went to Ann Kingsolver, anthropology, for her research on women and FTZ Employment in South Carolina. Her project, titled "Crossing the Line: Women and FTZ Employment in South Carolina, USA," is an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which women and other groups working in the Foreign Trade Zones in South Carolina perceive their rights as workers with these zones.

Marjorie Spruill, history, was awarded the Women's Studies Outstanding Teaching Award. Spruill received high praise from both undergraduate and graduate students, who were genuinely excited about the South Carolina women's history course she directed, which involved significant student research.

6/08