Faculty Research Award

Erin Cassese, a professor of political science and international relations and 2024 recipient of the Carter Series Faculty Research Award, will share her research analyzing women leaders in Congressional campaign ads from 2010 to 2020, with a focus on representations of Nancy Pelosi. Her work seeks an understanding of the gendered dynamics of negative campaigning and to examine the implications of those dynamics for women’s political careers.

Erin Cassese joined the University of Delaware in 2018, after 12 years at West Virginia University. She holds appointments in the Department of Political Science & International Relations, Communication, and Women and Gender Studies. Her current research focuses on voter psychology, with an emphasis on the role gender plays in political campaigns and elections. Her book, Abortion Attitudes and Polarization in the American Electorate, is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. Cassese’s scholarship has been cited by national media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vox and FiveThirtyEight. Cassese is also a Senior Researcher at the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media, where she conducts research on representation in entertainment media focused on gender, race/ethnicity, age, body size, disability, and LGBTQ+ identification.

"Welcoming Women: Co-Creating Communities of Refuge for Displaced Refugees"

What does "refuge" mean for women whose lives have been disrupted by conflict, war, and violence? Is it possible to feel "settled" following such events, and after migrating thousands of miles away to a new and unfamiliar country? In this talk, I share the findings from a year-long ethnographic project with displaced women and the volunteers who support them, and reflect on the kinds of experiences and value that women from refugee backgrounds bring to our communities--including Newark and the University of Delaware. I consider how a focus on "social reproduction" in our efforts to welcome migrants and refugees into our communities can benefit migrant newcomers and their citizen neighbors, alike. Together, we can imagine and strategize ways to create supportive community connections and build more just and inclusive shared worlds.

Georgina Ramsay, Ph.D., is an associate professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. She is a cultural anthropologist specializing in political and legal anthropology.

Ramsay's work focuses on the overarching question: What does it mean to be displaced in a world where precarity and instability increasingly seem to be the norm? Her research areas include refugees, citizenship and sovereignty, humanitarianism and human rights, exploitation and extractivism, homelessness and economic insecurity.

Her work aims to contextualize the movement of forced migrants worldwide within shared frames of experience and global complicity, thinking through how contemporary experiences of displacement reflect and reinforce long-standing structures of inequality and call into question collective futures of prosperity. Ramsay has conducted fieldwork with refugees in Australia, Uganda, and the United States, with internally displaced people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with people experiencing homelessness in the United States.

Ramsay is author of Impossible Refuge: The Control and Constraint of Refugee Futures (Routledge, 2018). She has published widely in academic journals, including Humanity, Anthropological Theory, Critique of Anthropology, Public Culture, Anthropological Quarterly, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Social Analysis, among others. Her writing has also been published in public media outlets, including Slate, The Conversation, and New Matilda. Her article, “Election Fact Check: Are Many Refugees Illiterate and Innumerate?" was selected for inclusion in The Conversation Yearbook 2016: 50 Standout Articles from Australia's Top Thinkers.

With climate change, political instability and economic precarity continuing to destabilize life around the globe, Ramsay's ongoing research continues to focus on displacement as a lens through which to link localized experiences of instability to the collective stakes of our global future. A migrant within the United States herself, Ramsay is committed to making the world—and her local community—more safe, welcoming, and receptive to all humans, regardless of their legal, political, social, and economic backgrounds.

The 2019 recipient of the Mae and Robert Carter Endowment Women’s Studies Faculty Research Award was Jaipreet Virdi, Ph.D. assistant professor, Department of History at the University of Delaware. Virdi received the 2019 Women’s Studies Faculty Research Award for her research “Gendering Deafness: Dorothy Brett’s Lived Experiences with Disability," which she presented for The Carter Series Lecture in November 2020. Dr. Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology, and disability. Her research and teaching interests include the history of medicine, the history of science, disability history, disability technologies, and material/visual culture studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto (2014). Her research on Dorothy Brett offers an alternative perspective for examining Brett’s biography, focusing on her disability and gender performances.

The 2018 recipient of the Mae and Robert Carter Endowment Women’s Studies Faculty Research Award was Ann V. Bell, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology, who presented her research "A Neglected Disparity: Race, Class, Gender, and the Lived Experience of Abortion" during her October 2019 lecture at UD. Bell's research explored the disconnect between statistics and women's lived experiences of abortion, asking how does the social construction of abortion and its embedded stereotypes influence how women understand and experience abortion? Furthermore, importantly, how does one's life circumstances, including race, class, and gender, shape such an experience? The standing room-only lecture was attended by students, faculty, and the UD community.

The 2016 recipient of the Mae and Robert Carter Endowment Women’s Studies Faculty Research Award Program was Rachael Hutchinson, Ph.D., associate professor of Japanese studies, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Delaware, who presented "The Representation of Women in Japanese War-Themed Video Games."

Hutchinson’s research focused on the representation of women in Japanese war-themed videogames, specifically the highly popular online card game Kantai Collection.

The 2015 Mae and Robert Carter Endowment Women’s Studies Faculty Research Award recipient was Amanda Bullough, Ph.D., assistant professor of management in the Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware, for "Women Entrepreneurs: Resilience and Reducing Fear through Business Ownership." Building on her previous research in countries like Afghanistan, Bullough presented her newest data on women entrepreneurs' perceptions about culture and adversity, domestically (Chicago) and abroad (Pakistan), and how these perceptions not only affect their business decisions but also how entrepreneurial activity in turn affects their perceptions of adversity. Bullough's research spans entrepreneurship, leadership, organizational behavior, cross-cultural management, and international development. Her newest streams of research include entrepreneurship in war zones and under adverse conditions, global leadership, and women's entrepreneurship and leadership.