PhD candidate, Alex Avery, has been selected as an American Doctoral Fellow with the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Avery is one of approximately 126 scholars selected from across the country.
The AAUW's flagship initiative, the American Doctoral Fellowship program is meant to "offset scholars’ expenses during one year of their doctoral program and deepens AAUW’s impact by accelerating diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia." It carries a stipend of $25,000 to assist in the offset of expenses. The American Doctoral Fellowship is open to women in all fields, with an emphasis on "those engaged in science, technology, engineering, and math fields, or those researching gender issues."
The fellowship will assist Avery with work on her dissertation titled, "Desire Under Distress: How Ethnic Conflict Shapes Fertility." Her research examines how ethnic conflict shapes women's fertility preferences, theorizing reproduction as a political act. Drawing on feminist theory, she shows how conflict transforms women's bodies into sites of identity, power, and contestation. Using cross-national analyses, survey experiments, and fieldwork, her work highlights how gender and conflict reshape demographic behavior.
The AAUW was established in 1888, and their American Fellowship program is the oldest non-institutional source of graduate funding for women in the United States. AAUW empowers women and girls by championing their success in higher education and pushing for bold policy solutions to create lasting change. For more than 140 years, AAUW has led the fight for gender equity in higher education and beyond. With a strong record of advocacy and action, AAUW continues to break barriers and defend the rights of women in education and the workplace.
