2025 Elaine Combs-Schilling Memorial Fellowship Winner

By
Columbia U ISSG
April 16, 2025

The Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender announces the winner of the 2025 Elaine Combs-Schilling Memorial Fellowship: Yasmeen Ebada.

Yasmeen is a PhD student in Communications at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. As an archival and oral historian, she examines the work of women journalists in times of war and social change. Her research focuses on the impact of trauma, moral distress, and moral injury on their reporting.

Yasmeen’s dissertation covers the history of Arab and Arab American feminist activism from the 1960s to the 1990s. With the rise of anti-Arab and Orientalist sentiments in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, she investigates how women activists and journalists countered the prevailing interventionist foreign policy narratives put forth by the US government and mainstream media.

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.