Nadia Guidotto, a student working towards a PhD in political science at York University, has been awarded CAUT’s J.H. Stewart Reid fellowship.

Nadia studies gender identity and sexual orientation. She has an honours bachelor of arts degree from Queen’s University, a master of laws from Osgoode Hall Law School and a master of arts from York University. Her current research analyzes intersex and how authoritative discourses like medicine and law support one another in maintaining a hierarchy of bodies to the exclusion of some bodies and to the benefit of others. Her goal is to shed light on how gender has been — and continues to be — constructed and regulated, and help explain why bodies that exist outside the binary gender system create anxiety and elicit violence as a result.

In 2008, she won an internship working on gender equality issues at the U.N., and while in New York took on an additional internship at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. In 2009, she was simultaneously accepted for the Summer Course on Human Rights held jointly in The Hague and Leuven (Belgium), the inaugural Canadian Institutes of Health Research summer institute on gender and health at the University of British Columbia, and the international summer school program, Interfacing the Sciences and Humanities, at the University of Bologna’s branch centre in Rimini, Italy. Also in 2009, she won a visiting research fellowship at the Centre of Gender Excellence at the University of Linköping, Sweden. This summer she enrolled in the one-week intensive CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women) for Change session held within the Women’s Human Rights Institute at the University of Toronto.

She has presented at numerous conferences and published articles on a variety of topics throughout her graduate career. Among her academic honours are a Chancellor’s Scholarship from Queen’s University, the high-profile Abella Scholarship for Studies in Equity from York University, and Canada Graduate Scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for both her masters and doctoral work.

Nadia was selected for CAUT’s fellowship by a three-member application review committee, which this year included Queen’s University biology professor Ken Ko, Chris Ferns, a professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University, and retired Bishop’s University sociology professor and former president of CAUT Loretta Czernis.

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CAUT established the annual J.H. Stewart Reid Memorial Fellowship more than 45 years ago to honour the memory of its first executive secretary. The program invites applications from students of exceptional academic standing in doctoral programs at Canadian universities. Stewart Reid Fellows receive $5,000 for one academic year of study.