Ph.D. candidates Mikey Elster and Paloma Rodrigo Gonzales were named 2022 Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellows by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. The one-year, $30,000 fellowship, awarded to 22 doctoral candidates nationwide, supports scholars who are addressing questions of ethical and religious values in interesting, original, or significant ways.

Elster’s dissertation project, Coming of Age in the Clinic: Ethics and Politics of Care in Transgender Pediatrics in New York City, is an examination of what transgender young people, their families, and their doctors consider good care in the broadest sense of the term.

In her dissertation project, From Stained Souls to Stained Skins: The Presence of Religious Epistemologies in the Typification of Peruvian Bodies, Rodrigo Gonzales examines how colonial Catholicism and 19th-century scientific racism led to the racial and racist configuration of a dark-colored birthmark, known to this day as the Mongolian spot, that is prevalent among infants in Peru.