We are very happy to announce that Dr. Sarah Bellows-Blakely has been named as a finalist for the Women’s Impact Award from the Falling Walls Foundation, The Elsevier Foundation and VolkswagenStiftung. This award is meant to support researchers whose work advances gender equality and creates tangible societal impact. We are currently seeing a backlash against gender studies in many parts of the world, which has gone hand-in-hand with political repression and violence. It is both timely and urgent to create spaces where scientific inquiry about gender and its intersecting dimensions can thrive.

Dr. Sarah Bellows-Blakely examines three case studies - from UN development programs and Berlin universities to colonial sciences - her research explores how ideas of gender and diversity were adopted or erased over time. It reveals why certain feminist and diversity frameworks, such as neoliberal feminism, gained institutional footholds while others did not.

Bio:
Dr. Bellows-Blakely leads the Berlin University Alliance-funded junior research group, “Fixing the System: Analyses in the Context of the History of Science,” at the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research group examines how specific frameworks for gender and intersecting forms of structural oppression have and have not institutionalized over time. Her recently-published book, Girl Power? The Birth of Girl-focused Development in Nairobi (Chicago University Press, 2025) explores how neoliberal feminism rose to dominance within the United Nations at the expense of alternative visions of gendered, economic, and intersectional justice. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Stanford University and Washington University in St. Louis before moving to Berlin in 2017, where she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Humboldt University. Since 2018, Dr. Bellows-Blakely has been at Freie Universität, first as a postdoctoral fellow of the DFG-funded Graduate School for Global Intellectual History and currently as junior research group leader at the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies and lecturer in the MA Program for Global History.