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. She is an archival and oral historian whose research centers on historiography. She examines the history of women journalists in war and social movements within the intersections of feminism, moral injury, moral distress, and trauma.
Yasmeen’s dissertation covers the history of Arab and Arab American activism from the 1960s to the 1990s, with a particular focus on the work of women. With the rise of anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and Orientalist sentiments in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Yasmeen investigates how women activists and journalists countered the prevailing interventionist foreign policy narratives put forth by the U.S. 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.
