Danielle LaPlace and Rahma Haji awarded AAUW Dissertation Fellowships

WGSS PhD students join 2024-2025 AAUW Fellows Cohort

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is proud to announce that PhD students Rahma Haji and Danielle LaPlace have both been awarded the 2024-2025 AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship.

The AAUW Dissertation Fellowship support women scholars pursuing full-time study to complete dissertations, conducting postdoctoral research full time, or preparing research for publication. 

Danielle LaPlace is a Ph.D candidate in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Danielle's project, "How We Accomplish this Work: Black Labor and U.S. Imperial Public Health in the Greater Caribbean, 1898-1934," examines forms of gendered black labor that remain overlooked in studies of the history and culture of both public health and U.S. empire. This method of analyzing the transnational production of Black labor puts historical public health materials and cultural products including newspapers, travel writing, novels and photographs in conversation with disability studies, critical race scholarship, women of color feminist theories, and colonial health histories. This regional study of the Greater Caribbean offers a critique of health and sanitation as benevolent features of U.S. imperialism, analyzes the continued post-emancipation commodification of Black bodies, and challenges the Eurocentrism of disability history.

Rahma Haji is a Ph.D candidate in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies working on completing her dissertation which is titled "Palimpsestic Blackness: Memes, Aesthetics and Relation." Employing memes as a "practice of everyday life," her dissertation examines blackness and relation. This project insists that the meme, as an aesthetic form and mode of communication, performs labor around race and racialization. In the dissertation, she locates the meme within a larger genealogy of black cultural production by focusing on the artistic productions of Arthur Jafa and Adrian Piper. In Jafa's work, she focuses on "Love is the message, the message is Death." In Piper's works, she examines Funk Lessons and My Calling (Cards) #1 and #2.

Congratulations Rahma and Danielle!