Summer Reading 2025: Recent Books by AAUW Fellows & Grantees
Is Grad School for Me? Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, American Fellowships 1996-97 Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and holds affiliations in Chicana/o, Feminist, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. She is currently the Faculty Director of the UCSB McNair Scholars Program. She has published three books, her most recent is “Migrant Longing: Letter Writing Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2018). Her soon-to-be published “Is Grad for Me? Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students” (Berkeley, 2024), co-authored with Yvette Martinez-Vu, will appear in winter.
Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section and the Disturbing State of Maternal Medical Care
Rachel Somerstein, American Fellowships 2016-17 Rachel Somerstein is the author of Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section and an associate professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz. She has written about maternal health and other topics for the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and WIRED, among other publications. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.
Equality Unfulfilled: How Title IX Policy Design Undermines Change College Sports
Elizabeth Sharrow, American Fellowships 2011-12 Elizabeth A. Sharrow is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has won multiple awards for her scholarship on Title IX.
Black Panther Woman – The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins
Mary Phillips, American Fellowships 2018-19 Mary Frances Phillips is a proud native of Detroit, Michigan. She is a historian, author, speaker, activist, and Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her interdisciplinary research agenda and scholarly interests focus on race and gender in post-1945 social movements and the carceral state, the Modern Black Freedom Struggle, Black Feminism, and Black Power Studies. Her essays have been featured in the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine’s blog, New Black Man (in Exile), Colorlines, Vibe Magazine, Black Youth Project, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog, Black Perspectives. Her work has garnered media attention in TIME Magazine, the New York Historical Museum & Library Women at the Center blog series, the Detroit Free Press, BronxNet Cable Television, Bronx News 12, WBAI Pacifica Radio, New York City, and WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio. Follow her on twitter @mfphillips
Without Fear – Black Women and the Making of Human Rights
Keisha Blain, American Fellowships 2016-17 Keisha N. Blain is professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University. She is a Guggenheim, Carnegie, and New America Fellow, and author—most recently of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Until I Am Free.
Fellowships & Grants
Essential summer reading for 2022 from stellar scholars and authors who have received educational funding from AAUW.