Abstract
This contribution studies the CRB Educational Foundation’s travel programme between Belgium and the United States during the interwar years. It focuses on women’s participation in the programme and on the role of gender in the ways in which the foundation constructed and enacted ideals of being a good fellow. The scientific persona that the CRB tried to shape was twofold: scholarly and diplomatic. Candidates who combined a good academic record with strong social skills, “personality”, and potential to act as an “ambassador” were selected. The CRB officials acted with a certain awareness of the difficulties female candidates and fellows encountered. This awareness was however not shared among the CRB’s Belgian partners and did not really affect the implicitly masculine character of the persona they co-created. Indeed, the minority of female candidates and fellows faced gendered inequalities and biases that existed both in the academic and the broader social world and which hindered them, especially in Belgium, in performing the persona of the CRB fellow. Although fellows were expected to inscribe themselves into a “sexless” discourse, the exchange experience itself proved a powerful incentive to challenge that discourse.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Archives
Brussels, Archive of the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BBAEF).
Stanford, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, CRB Educational Foundation Collection.
Published works
Bosch, Mineke. “Scholarly Personae and Twentieth-Century Historians: Explorations of a Concecpt.” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 33–54.
Cabanel, Anna. “‘How Excellent… for a Woman’? The Fellowship Programme of the International Federation of University Women in the Interwar Period.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 88–102.
Cabanel, Anna. La fabrique d’une persona scientifique au féminin. The International Federation of University Women. Années 1920-années 1960. Unpublished PhD thesis, Universities of Leuven and Groningen, 2019.
Coghe, Sara. Diplomaten en diploma’s. De ambities van de Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation en de ervaringen van haar fellows aan de Katholieke Universiteit van Leuven (1920–1940). Unpublished master thesis KU Leuven, 2018.
C.R.B. Educational Foundation, Inc. Annual Report (New York, s.d.) [1920–1940].
Daston, Lorraine and Sibum, H. Otto “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories.” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (2003): 1–8.
Despy-Meyer, Andrée. “Les étudiantes dans les universités belges de 1880 à 1941.” Perspectives Universitaires 3, no. 1–2 (1986): 17–49.
Dyhouse, Carol. “The British Federation of University Women and the Status of Women in Universities, 1907–1939.” Women’s History Review 4, no. 4 (1995): 465–485.
Gadi, Algazi. “Exemplum and Wundertier: Three Concepts of the Scholarly Persona.” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 8–32.
Huistra, Pieter and Wils, Kaat. “Fit to Travel. The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on Scientific Persona Formation (1920–1940).” Low Countries Historical Review 131, no. 4 (2016): 112–134.
Krige, John. American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Lamont, Michèle. How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Lykknes, Annette, Opitz, Donald L., and Van Tiggelen, Brigitte eds. For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences, Basel: Birckhäuser, 2012.
Niskanen, Kirsti, Bosch, Mineke and Wils, Kaat. “Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice—Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities.” Persona Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 1–5.
Nys, Liesbet, Bertrams, Kenneth and Wils, Kaat. A Century of Transatlantic Scientific Exchange. The Belgian American Educational Foundation, 1920–2020. Louvain: Leuven University Press, forthcoming.
Ochsner, Michael, Hug, Sven E., and Hans-Dieter Daniel eds. Research Assessment in the Humanities. Towards Criteria and Procedures. Cham: Springer, Cham, 2016.
Paul, Herman. “What Is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills and Desires.” History and Theory 53 (October 2014): 348–371.
Paul, Herman. “Introduction: Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930.” In Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870-1930, edited by Christiaan Engberts and Herman Paul, 1–16. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019.
Pietsch, Tamson and Chou, Meng-Hsuan. “The Politics of Scholarly Exchange. Taking the Long View on the Rhodes Scholarships.” In Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, edited by Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith 33–64. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018.
Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America, vol. 1: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Syga-Dubois, Judith. “Managing Scientific Exchange in Interwar Germany.” In Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, edited by Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, 113–126. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018.
Tournès, Ludovic. “La fondation Rockefeller et la construction d’une politique des sciences sociales en France (1918–1940).” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no. 6 (2008): 1371–1402.
Tournès, Ludovic. “Le réseau des boursiers Rockefeller et la recomposition des savoirs biomédicaux en France (1920–1970).” French Historical Studies 29, no. 1 (2016): 77–107.
Tournès, Ludovic and Scott-Smith, Giles. “Introduction. A World of Exchanges.” In Global Exchanges, Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, edited by Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, 1–29. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018.
Van Dongen, Jeroen and Paul, Herman eds. Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and Humanities. Cham: Springer, 2017.
Walton, Whitney. Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890–1970. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Walton, Whitney. “Internationalism, Travel Writing, and Franco-American Educational Travel, 1898–1939.” In Crossing the Atlantic: Travel and Travel Writing in Modern Times, edited by Thomas Adam and Nils Roemer, 50–78. Arlington: Texas University Press, 2011.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wils, K., Huistra, P. (2021). Scholarly Persona Formation and Cultural Ambassadorship: Female Graduate Students Travelling Between Belgium and the United States. In: Niskanen, K., Barany, M.J. (eds) Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49606-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-49605-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49606-7
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)