Career Enhancement Fellowships for Junior Faculty

Since joining the Women’s Studies program as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2017, I have supported my global research efforts across the U.S., U.K., and the Caribbean amid many financial struggles at my institution. For tenure and promotion, at UNH, tenure-track faculty in the College of Liberal Arts are asked to produce six single-authored articles or one singleauthored book within a six-year time frame. Additionally, faculty are expected to be active in their campus and intellectual communities with focus on university-level and field-level involvement. Since our research designation has been elevated, greater emphasis has also been put on producing single-authored books rather than articles. Since there is little support for pretenure research leaves, this shift in research production considerations has precipitated greater anxieties. The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship (WWCEF) would give me the adequate support necessary to complete my first single-authored manuscript, Beyond Barbie (under contract with the University of Illinois Press) as well as several outstanding articles and book chapters, without the stress of teaching and campus commitments. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I have used our $1,500 per-academic-year research budget for annual conference support to heighten my scholarly profile across interdisciplinary fields. With financial constraints, I am generally unable to attend both of my large disciplinary conferences (American Studies Association or National Women’s Studies Association meetings) or have had to financially support myself to attend smaller, regional conferences to present my research with other scholars in my fields. These larger meetings provide the intellectual community that I have harnessed to create writing groups, panel participants, and create opportunities to present the research I conduct at the intersections of Black feminist theory, visual culture, and girlhood studies at other institutions and community events. Opportunities like these form the crux of important relationships for me as I promote the benefits of the humanities, especially when centering the experiences of the marginalized and dehumanized. The WWCEF would financially assist me in maintaining and broadening my research-related networks for my tenure dossier and my work in the humanities beyond the university. To maintain a competitive research agenda I earnestly apply every semester for grants and fellowships to support archival research, interviews, and conference trips from the Center for the Humanities and the Dean of the college, yet I routinely cannot meet more than75% of the necessary funding I need per trip. For example, after a successful second year review evaluation, our new dean acknowledged my fundraising efforts and great publishing record