Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Chris Lerman Prize for Essays on Extraordinary Women

This annual prize was established in 1995 by Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer '69 to honor her mother Rosalie Chris Lerman, a Holocaust survivor, national leader on issues pertaining to Israel and the Holocaust, and a devoted wife and mother. In the words of Jeanette, Chris was "an extraordinary woman who measured her achievement in terms of nurturing those she loved, making it possible for them to dream big and work ferociously to achieve their dreams."

The prize was created to promote scholarship about extraordinary, though not necessarily notable or well-known women. The Chris Lerman Prize recognizes that women have expressed their wisdom, talents, vision and courage in a variety of ways.

Recent Award Recipients

Prize Year Recipient Paper
2020-21 Alejandra Bonilla "La Matriz de Nuestras Madres es Nuestro Hogar: Strategies to Manage Housing Instability amongst Latinas in the United States"
2019-20 Hannah Kressel "Beyond the Balaboosta:
Nurturance, Spirituality, and the Body in the Art of Jewish Women"
2018-19 Rebecca Hersch The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom: The United Response of Muslim and Jewish Women to "Moral Shocks"
2018-19 Adrian King "Free Enough To Be Them: Black Masculine of Center Fashioning"
2017-18 Yael Jaffe "Shuley, Shulie, Shulamith: The Evolution of Shulamith Firestone"
2015-16 Margot Kotler "Virginia Woolf's anti-Bildungsromane: From Feminist Critique to Queer Temporality"
2014-15 Casey Clevenger "Women with Hearts As Wide as the World: Gender, Race and Inequality in Women's Transnational Religious Organizations"
2013-14 Cassandra Berman " 'WEEP for such unfortunate mothers!' Motherhood and the Anti-Shaker Narratives of Eunice Hawley Chapman and Mary Marshall Dyer"