By Meredith Watkins
The Duke University Center for International and Global Studies is delighted to announce that two Duke graduate students have been awarded the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) award for the 2020-2021 academic year. Jacqueline Mercier Allain and Natalie Gasparowicz, both Ph.D. students in the Department of History, received grants to travel abroad in support of their dissertation projects.
The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship Program provides opportunities to doctoral candidates to engage in full-time dissertation research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies. The program is designed to contribute to the development and improvement of the study of modern foreign languages and area studies in the United States. Award funding covers international travel expenses, maintenance allowance, project allowance for research-related expenses, and health and accident insurance premiums for a trip lasting between six and 12 months.
Allain’s project will take her to both France and Martinique, where she will analyze how reproduction and motherhood shaped black Martinican women’s status as colonial subjects and their claims to citizenship in the post-slavery French empire, in support of her dissertation, “Birthing Imperial Citizens.”
Gasparowicz will be spending ten months at El Colegio de México in Mexico City as a visiting doctoral student in 2021. During her time in Mexico, Gasparowicz will be participating in graduate seminars in the departments of Gender Studies, Sociology, and History, as well as conducting research for her dissertation project, which is titled “Catholic Counterculture: Lived Catholicisms and the Contraceptive Pill in Mexico, 1960-1992.”
At Duke, the DDRA application process is coordinated by the Duke University Center for International and Global Studies. To learn more about the application process and requirements, please visit the DUCIGS website or contact Hal Matthews.
