The Distinguished Achievement Award honors outstanding contributions to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer anthropology through scholarship, research, teaching, mentoring, service, public engagement, and/or activism. The award seeks to honor our elders, recognize lifetime career achievements, and build community by connecting generations of AQA scholars. This year the Association for Queer Anthropology honors Ellen Lewin with the Distinguished Achievement Award!
Ellen is Professor of Women’s Studies and Anthropology at the University of Iowa. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, and her PhD at Stanford. She taught at various universities in Northern California, including the University of California San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley and Stanford.
Her trailblazing work has centered around questions of motherhood, reproduction, health, and sexuality in American culture with attention to the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and parental status. A focus on narrative characterizes her ethnographies, giving voice to queer populations that have historically been silenced.
Ellen has been awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Anthropological Scholarship on a Lesbian or Gay topic FOUR times for the following monographs and edited volumes:
Lesbian Mothers, Accounts of Gender in American Culture, a pioneering monograph which she began research for in 1977, a time when lesbian mothers were losing custody of their children by court of law on the basis of their sexuality.
Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America, a thick description of gay fatherhood in American society published in 2009 at the height of the US gay marriage debates.
As well as two edited volumes with William Leap:
Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology published in 2002, and Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian / Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World published in 2009, both of which brought together established and emerging LGBTQ scholars to shape the field of queer anthropology.
In her most recent work, Filled with the Spirit: Sexuality, Gender, And Radical Inclusivity in a Black Pentecostal Church Coalition, Ellen explores the experiences of African American LGBTQ individuals in radical churches that amalgamate religious beliefs with social justice and queer politics.
Ellen has provided mentorship and guidance for many generations of queer anthropologists, she’s given junior scholars opportunities to publish their work, and paved the way for the acceptability of queer anthropology.
Ellen has often written that her research has taken her to surprising places: from marriage to parenthood to religion – areas of the world that once seemed to exclude queer subjects. But through changing times and unfamiliar terrains, Ellen has beautifully and carefully captured emerging queer worlds well before they became acceptable in American society.
Please join the AQA in congratulating Ellen on this momentous achievement!