The University Libraries announced in May that graduate student Andelina Dreshaj was the 2022 Patricia Stocking Brown Research Award recipient.
A second-year doctoral student in the Department of History, Ms. Dreshaj received $500 for her research to explore the Women’s Building Collection and how activists in the Albany, New York community, specifically the Committee for a New Korea Policy, were a part of a larger global conversation about capitalism, neocolonialism, human rights, and the creation of asymmetrical geopolitical power. This project was created in the Department of History’s graduate Research Seminar. Dr. Alexander Dawson of the Department of History served as faculty advisor.
The annual Award honors Professor Patricia Stocking Brown, who taught Biology and Women’s and Minorities’ Studies for 35 years at nearby Siena College. Trained at the University of Michigan in comparative endocrinology, and a self-described feminist, Patricia Stocking Brown was the first female faculty member in the sciences at Siena. There she established an extraordinary career as a caring and rigorous teacher and researcher who promoted student research, feminist analytical thinking, and evidence-based medicine. Brown was the wife of University at Albany Distinguished Teaching Professor of Biology Emeritus Stephen C. Brown.
Andelina Dreshaj
Professor Patricia Stocking Brown died in 2004 from metastatic breast cancer. The University at Albany Libraries’ Department of Special Collections & Archives holds Brown’s papers along with those of the grassroots nonprofit Capital Region Action Against Breast Cancer (CRAAB!), which she co-founded in 1997, and the New York State Breast Cancer Network, a coalition of grassroots breast cancer groups around the state, she co-founded soon after.
Donors from the University at Albany’s Women’s Studies and Biology Departments, including Professor of Women’s Studies Emerita Bonnie Spanier, established The Patricia Stocking Brown Fund for Feminist Social Justice Research in University Libraries to support and promote students’ interest in and use of primary materials related to the study of social justice, housed in the Department of Special Collections & Archives. Award applicants must be a registered University at Albany graduate or undergraduate student and currently engaged in or planning a research project/class paper related to social justice. Awardees must utilize at least one manuscript or archival collection at the University as part of their research.