Fellowship / Fellows

Amy Erdman Farrell

  • 2021–2022
  • Humanities
  • Mary Beth and Chris Gordon Fellow
  • Dickinson College
Portrait of Amy Farrell
Photo courtesy of Amy Farrell

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

The James Hope Caldwell Memorial Chair and a professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Dickinson College, Amy Erdman Farrell focuses her work on the history of girls and women in the United States, second wave feminism, representations of gender and feminisms in popular culture, and the history and representation of the body and fatness. She is the author of Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (NYU Press, 2011). 

As the 2021–2022 Mary Beth and Chris Gordon Fellow, Farrell plans to complete the research and writing for her book “Girl Scouts of the USA: Race, Democracy, Sisterhood, and Empire,” which focuses on the understudied yet extraordinarily important history of the Girl Scouts, from its origins in 1912 through the 1980s. Focusing on particularly evocative moments of its history, the book explores the Girl Scouts’ complex struggles over race and civil rights, feminism, and the legacies of empire and colonialism. The Schlesinger Library is a crucial resource for her research. 

Farrell is a past recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and the Aspen Foundation Fellowship and is a frequent media commentator. She earned a PhD in American studies and feminist studies from the University of Minnesota.

A Vision of Universal, though Not Integrated, Sisterhood (Harvard Gazette, 3/17/22)

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

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