MIT Libraries’ Department of Distinctive Collections (DDC) has hosted two round of the Women@MIT Fellowship. The Fellowship provides funding for artists, activists, musicians, writers, and scholars who are engaged in the expansion and expression of knowledge to help inform the understanding of women in MIT’s history and the history of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We are particularly interested in those who will apply the interdisciplinary lenses and methodologies of women’s studies, gender studies, and/or race and ethnic studies to their work. 

2023 

View recording of Fellows' presentations

• Mapping Migration at MIT is a StoryMap highlighting the voices of eighteen international women from the MIT community, using oral history interviews from MIT's Department of Distinctive Collections and the Science History Institute's Digital Collections. These eighteen women come from all over the world and their experiences at MIT span the twentieth century. "Mapping Migration at MIT" is an opportunity to shed light on the diversity of people who do science at MIT and to feature the stories of international women at MIT in their own words.

  • Rachel Lane is a historian and writer who holds a BA in history and Spanish from Hillsdale College and an MA in history with an emphasis in public history from Norwich University.

• Sisters in Making: Prototyping and the Feminine Resilience works to explore and reveal the multi-level efforts of women surrounding the invention and implementation of Core Rope Memory and Magnetic Core Memory in the Apollo Guidance Computer that put man on the moon in 1969. From their use in early NASA Mars space probes to becoming an integral component of the Apollo 11 Moon Mission, MIT dedicated a tremendous workforce, alongside its commercial and federal partners, to perfecting its implementation of Core Memories.

  • Soala Lolia Ajienka designs artifacts that have their bearing in material forms and transformations that cut across the disciplines of architecture, textiles and art.

  • Deborah Tsogbe is a design researcher and holds a Masters in design computation from MIT.

2021

• A Lab of One’s Own: An Immersive Virtual Installation is a video game in which participants play an unnamed researcher living on a small island scattered with several observation stations. As players interact with the environment, including laboratory equipment, paper ephemera, and other objects, they will activate a pop-up user interface through which different characters tell stories about their life and discoveries.

  • Mariana Roa Oliva creates fiction, performance, and installation works and holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.

  • Maya Bjornson is a multimedia artist and a graduate of the Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Dual Degree program.