Associate Professor Of Women’S Studies Receives Neh Grant

Ashwini Tambe will use grant to help complete book project on how the age boundary between girlhood and womanhood has shifted in the last century.

The College of Arts and Humanities extends its congratulations to Ashwini Tambe, associate professor in the Department of Women’s Studies, for receiving a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to help finish a book project.

Tambe said the $6,000 will allow her to intensely focus on the final chapter of “The Production of Innocence: Girlhood in the Twentieth Century” during the summer. The book examines how various countries began to agree on a common age standard for defining the boundaries of girlhood during the last century, particularly under the auspices of intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations and League of Nations.

The age boundary was shaped during discussions about trafficking, statutory rape and child marriage during the last century, Tambe said. Power inequalities between countries affected the process of “harmonizing” age standards that differentiated girlhood from womanhood, Tambe added.

The last chapter will focus on the U.N. and rise of the term “girl child,” Tambe said, and how “girls became a distinct target of humanitarian intervention.”

Tambe’s research for the project is drawn from international organization archives, national legal debates, scientific textbooks, popular magazines and oral histories. The final chapter requires research
within U.N. document databases and indexes.

Tambe’s major areas of research include transnational feminist theory, sexuality studies, global political economy and modern south Asian history. She is also the editorial director of the scholarly journal Feminist Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in international studies (2000) from American University.

Tambe joins other ARHU faculty who have received NEH grants, including:

2014
Valérie K. Orlando, SLLC
"The Influence of the French New Novel on Authors of the Maghreb, 1950 to the New Millennium"
https://www.arhu.umd.edu/news/valérie-k-orlando-wins-neh-summer-stipend

2013
Richard J. Bell, History 
"Kidnapper and Slave Trader Patty Cannon (c. 1760-1829) and the Illicit Market for Slaves in the U.S."

2012
Daryle Williams, History
"A Spatial History of the Free Africans of the Slave Ship Cezar, 1838-1865”

https://www.arhu.umd.edu/news/umd-faculty-among-neh-grant-winners