Greetings and welcome to the 2017-18 academic year! We’re proud to report that SPAN is now entering its eighth year of life at Northwestern—in fact, this is the last year of our second phase of funding from Northwestern’s Human Sexualities Endowment. We have already submitted a new proposal for years 2018 to 2021, and we are currently awaiting final approval of our budget from the Provost’s office.
Meanwhile, we are already moving forward with a new search for postdoctoral fellows for 2018-20. If you know any recent PhDs who may be interested, please feel free to send them the link to the call for applications.
This year you can also expect to see all of SPAN’s regular opportunities for graduate students, including dissertation fellowships, funding to present sexuality-related work at academic conferences, and funding to conduct summer research. Please keep an eye on the deadlines during the year. The first deadline for conference presentations is October 13. We are also planning to hold a faculty-graduate student reading group in the Winter quarter, and our yearly workshop in Spring.
We want to take this opportunity to thank Gregory Ward for his impressive leadership at the helm of SPAN as interim director during our research leave last year. Thanks also to program assistant Eliot Colin for their steady efforts throughout the year, to Amy Partridge and Aaron Norton for coordinating last year’s SPAN reading group, to our postdocs Mitali Thakor and AJ Lewis for helping organize the SPAN workshop, and to the GSS faculty members who served on SPAN selection committees.
We invite you to visit the SPAN website for more information about all our upcoming activities and funding opportunities. Please do check out two new components of our website: Our “Recent publications” page lists recent works by faculty, postdocs, and graduate students who have received SPAN funding. And our “Where are they now?” page lists their current affiliations and other achievements. Congratulations to all of them! We are very pleased that SPAN was able to support their successful and impressive careers! Please email Eliot if you have any publications or other information you would like to add to these pages.
Have a great year, and we look forward to reconnecting with you soon!
All best,
Héctor Carrillo and Steve Epstein
Co-Directors, the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN)
The Sexualities Project at Northwestern helps graduate students to publicize their work and findings. Students are invited to apply for up to $500 in funding to offset expenses to attend conferences where they present work related to sexuality or sexual orientation. This year SPAN has obtained a small grant that allows us to fund a limited number of applications that are strictly in the humanities (in addition to our usual focus on the social sciences broadly construed). 
