Congratulations to SFU English graduate student Dana Graham Lai, who is this year's recipient of the David and Mary Macaree Graduate Fellowship in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The fellowship provides financial support to graduate students whose research focuses on topics identified by the Research Centre for Scottish Studies as primary areas of research. Graham Lai's research focuses on the relationship between space and gender in Scottish women’s literature of the 19th century. She describes her research as follows:

Whether we look to the past or the present, gender permeates space and is never neutral. As such, how women writers used space and place as narrative strategies is thus critical in understanding hidden relations of power in the production of space. I will examine how Scottish women negotiated relationships of power within the spaces they occupied, including factory, domestic, and natural spaces, as well as conceptual spaces such as economic, cultural, legal, and medical spaces.

I will look at how they were subjected to familial and public epistemic practices of domination, surveillance, and control in these spaces. Focusing on divisions between work and home, the public and private, I will show that they contested epistemic practices through resistance and, if they were lucky, created networks with other women to accomplish this resistance. My methodology will involve defining and mapping ideological spaces in the narratives under study. I will combine feminist geographer Doreen Massey’s theories of feminist geography with Michel Foucault’s historical analysis of power and knowledge. What matters in space is rooted in identity, and for women this means acts of exclusion are intertwined with issues of power and ideology which also determine how or if women’s space is valued. My research will consider a range of authorship and genre in order to illuminate spatial power relations across classes.