Caroline Radesky has been awarded a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources.

Radesky is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. Her dissertation focuses on same-sex individuals’ uses of history to construct transnational and transhistorical sexual subjectivities. She is researching individual stories (of people like Earl Lind, author of Autobiography of an Androgyne,) of people who lived in the late 19th and early 20th-century United States, England, and Germany.

“Receiving the Mellon Fellowship is a true honor,” says Radesky, who will use the fellowship to conduct research in archives throughout the United States. “I will be examining the original papers of same-sex desiring individuals in order to better understand the formation of sexual identity.”

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Mellon Fellowship supports original source dissertation research in the humanities or related social sciences.

Radesky has received several other awards, including the Jane A. Weiss Dissertation Scholarship, given by the Department of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the UI.  She also participated in the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities Summer Seminar in 2014 and was a recipient of the Adele Kimm Scholarship at the UI in2014.

“(The Mellon Fellowship) would not have been possible without the unending encouragement and support I receive from my department and particularly my advisors, Leslie Schwalm, Douglas Baynton, and Lisa Heineman,” Radesky says.

Heineman, Radesky’s advisor who teaches graduate seminars in European history, gender and sexuality, is excited for the opportunities this award will provide for her student.

“The Mellon is one of the most selective and prestigious dissertation fellowships nationwide, and Radesky joins a group of truly high-powered young scholars in gaining Mellon support,” Heineman says. “Her work helps us to understand the role of historical thinking in liberation struggles as well as the formation of modern sexual identities.”