By Jill Goetz
Judith Surkis, a graduate student in the Department of History, has received a Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship from Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's oldest and most respected academic honorary society.
The fellowship was established by a former Cornell graduate student, Isabelle Stone, who received a Ph.D. in Greek history and language in 1908 and named the award in honor of her mother. The fellowship has been given annually since 1939 to women ages 25 to 35 who hold a doctorate or have fulfilled all requirements for the doctorate except the dissertation. Recipients, who need not be affiliated with Cornell or Phi Beta Kappa, receive a $10,000 stipend to conduct original research in Greece or France.
Surkis will spend the upcoming year in Paris, conducting archival research related to her dissertation topic, "Virile Politics in Interwar France."
"I'm trying to look at the ways in which gender relations were destabilized in France after the First World War," Surkis said. "I am particularly interested in how the perception of a postwar crisis in traditional gender roles may have contributed to the development and appeal of non-conformist and fascist thought in the interwar years."
Such research could provide much-needed context for better understanding the rise of fascism during the interwar period, said Surkis' adviser, Dominick LaCapra, the Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies and director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell.
"One of her special interests is the role of gender in the culture of illiberalism of the interwar period," LaCapra said. "It's an area in which people have started to work recently, but it's still an area in which much more needs to be done."