The Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender announces the winner of the 2023 Elaine Combs-Schilling Memorial Fellowship: Tianyuan Huang.
Tianyuan Huang is a PhD candidate in Japanese history at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Columbia University. Her research sits at the intersection of the history of medicine and health, gender and women's history, and agnotology, the study of ignorance. Tianyuan’s dissertation interrogates how gender and power shaped the mechanism of certainty and uncertainty both in and in relation to medicine, and what this has meant for individual women’s lived experiences of illness in Japanese society over the past two centuries. Tianyuan received her Bachelor of Laws (2014) and Master of Laws (2017) in International Politics from Peking University and a Master of Public Policy (2017) from the University of Tokyo. Before entering the PhD program at Columbia University, she worked for an LGBTI rights NGO as a part-time researcher with a focus on international human rights mechanisms and human rights diplomacy.
The Elaine Combs-Schilling Memorial Fellowship, established to honor the memory of Elaine Combs-Schilling (1949-2016), Professor of Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is awarded annually to an ISSG graduate student. The fellowship provides an opportunity to pursue summer archival research and travel in support of their doctoral work with a stipend of $2,000. Funding for the fellowship comes from the Elaine Combs-Schilling Memorial Fund.
