Fellowships for Graduate Study

The AABC Fellowship for Graduate Study has been awarded annually to outstanding graduating seniors and alumnae by the Fellowship for Graduate Study Committee of the Alumnae Association of Barnard College. This is the final year that the AABC Fellowship for Graduate Study will be offered. We are deeply grateful to the Edith and Frances Mulhall Achilles Memorial Fund for supporting this program. The family’s generosity has made it possible for many of our accomplished alumnae who show exceptional promise to pursue their selected course of study.

Andrea Y. Adomako ’15

Andrea Y. Adomako is a Ph.D. student in African American studies at Northwestern University. Her research examines how black children’s literature, both by and about black girls, is an ideological tool used to communicate black girls’ ideas about violence and intimacy. She is concerned with the ways in which black girls’ proximity to death is often overlooked in the popular cultural landscape.

Adomako received her M.A. in American studies from Purdue University and is currently a fellow in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Northwestern. Her interdisciplinary scholarship spans the fields of black feminist theory, black girlhood studies, literary criticism, and black political thought. Through her scholarship and teaching, Adomako hopes to advocate for scholarship that critically engages with black childhood(s) as a site of theoretical influence.

Mary McElroy '15

Mary McElroy is a Ph.D. student in marine science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Her research combines simple seawater sampling with advanced DNA sequencing to study the impacts of stressors, including climate change, fishing, and pollution, on biodiversity in ecologically and economically important coastal ecosystems, such as kelp forests, seagrass meadows, and coral reefs. She hopes to develop more accessible, powerful tools for biological monitoring that can empower marine conservation and management, as well as science outreach and education. McElroy shares her passion for marine ecology with her community as a teaching assistant and volunteer educator.

Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers '94

Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers is a Ph.D. student in the theatre program at the Ohio State University (OSU). Her research and creative work intersect both dance and theatre, focusing on musical theatre, women’s roles on stage, and the evolution of the showgirl.

Oehlers received her M.A. at OSU, where she was a 2015-16 University Fellow. Her master’s thesis, “Spectacular Women: The Radio City Rockettes from 1925 to 1971,” traces the history and trajectory of the Rockettes as female dancers and uses them as a framework with which to investigate modes of modernity and nostalgia. Her Ph.D. scholarship will include further study of the Rockettes and focuses on how images of women are constructed and circulated through appearances on stage and in the media, and how this furnishes well-documented and popular sites through which to examine issues of class and agency.

Gabrielle Robbins '16

Gabrielle Robbins is a Ph.D. student in MIT’s History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society program. She combines anthropology of the environment, science, and medicine in order to study pharmaceutical industries in Francophone Africa. Her current research focuses on agribusiness projects that grow raw materials for medicines. Robbins explores how local farming communities — many of which cannot access the pharmaceuticals derived from the raw materials they grow — creatively navigate and endure global industrial and extractive systems.

Alexandra Sukalo '09

Alexandra Sukalo is a Ph.D. student at Stanford University. Her dissertation examines the institutionalization of the Soviet political police in Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine from 1918 to 1953 and explores the role of the political police in transforming these once-independent countries into Soviet Socialist Republics. Sukalo aspires to teach history and to work to bridge the gap between policymakers and academics on the history of Eastern Europe and U.S.–Eastern European relations.