Provost Mary Osirim Awarded the Sociologists for Women in Society Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Award
The SWS Distinguished Lectureship was founded in 1985 as a way of recognizing members whose scholarship employs a feminist perspective, and of making this scholar available to campuses where feminist voices are less often heard.
As a recipient of the award, Osirim will present a lecture at the summer 2017 SWS meeting and at two other U.S. campuses. A written version of the lecture will be published in Gender & Society.
Osirim’s research contributes to the fields of gender studies, development and migration in many areas, including women, entrepreneurship, and the roles of the state and non-governmental organizations in the microenterprise sectors of urban Nigeria and Zimbabwe. She is also active in efforts to increase the visibility of gender studies scholarship emanating from Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa and the development of African immigrant communities in the northeastern U.S. Her work within the feminist political economy paradigm helped shape the field of transnational feminist discourse and pedagogy, especially on Africa and the African Diaspora. She is the author of Enterprising Women in Urban Zimbabwe: Gender, Microbusiness and Globalization and the co-editor of Global Philadelphia: Immigrant Communities, Old and New, among numerous other publications.
Prior to being named Provost in 2015, Osirim served as the College’s Interim Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies. In addition to chairing the Sociology Department, she has previously served as a co-director of the College’s Center for International Studies and its Center for Ethnicities, Communities, and Social Policy (now the Center for Social Sciences), and as director of its Africana Studies Program. She has also been the Faculty Diversity Liaison at the College and a member of the Diversity Leadership Group.