Washington Women
The educated mind comes at a price: hundreds of hours of research and study; reams of papers; group projects; intensive examinations; conscientious notes from lengthy lectures. And for doctoral candidate students, that's the easy part, says Washingtonian Shireen...
Reinventing Community: SisterMentors Dissertation Support Groups For Women of Color
by Avonie Brown No doubt you have heard it said in more ways than one that, "Black people just can't get it together;" or that "We don't know how to work together." But just how truthful are these statements? Our history of resistance and survival suggests otherwise....
Women of Color Mentoring Each Other
by Shireen K. Lewis, Ph.D. Originally published on AAUW.org In September 1997 I founded a dissertation support group at Sisterspace and Books, a Washington, D.C. bookstore, to introduce a new paradigm of mentoring and support for women doctoral candidates of color. I...
Dissertation Writers Find Power in Numbers
by Denise Barnes Shireen Lewis has climbed the fractious ivory tower. Now, she's demystifying the dreaded dissertation process for women of color who want to achieve doctoral status. Ms. Lewis, who holds a doctorate of philosophy in French literature from Duke...
Ms. Magazine Article on Shireen Lewis
by R. Erica Doyle 1997, SHIREEN LEWIS WAS ANOTHER isolated scholar climbing up the ivory tower, teetering on the brink of that limbo known as ABD (all but dissertation) "Something was going to give," Lewis remembers, "and It wasn't going to be me!" Drawing on her...
Replicating Ourselves
by Julianne Malveaux, Ph.D. Featured in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, Black Issues in Higher Education, December 1999 What has the 20th century meant for African American women in higher education? Over a steaming cup of tea, I smile as I fall into the...
Gendering Négritude: Paulette Nardal’s Contribution to the Birth of Modern Francophone Literature
What about the women of Négritude? The Négritude movement has traditionally been characterized and historicized as a literary and cultural movement by black men against the imperialist, masculinist power of the West. There are very few studies that fully explore the...