Recipient: American Association of University Women (AAUW) Fellowship

Year: 2018

As an AAUW American Fellow, Caroline Radesky receives time to complete her dissertation and connects her works to rich history of female scholars.

“I am honored and humbled to be counted among these women and to be a part of an organization that supports such groundbreaking work,’’ says Radesky, a Ph.D. candidate in history.

Radesky’s dissertation examines how same-sex desiring women and men inscribed the past onto the present to explain their sexual and affective experience, and also to navigate their own desire and create a world in which they could survive and even thrive.

Using an interdisciplinary framework linking history, memory studies, queer theory, and feminist studies, she examines how these individuals resurrected historical examples of same-sex desire drawn from Ancient Greece, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to formulate a collective history and position themselves as a transnational community.