Architecture student awarded AAUW Fellowship

LAWRENCE — Sabrina Shafique, a graduate student in the University of Kansas Department of Architecture, was recently awarded an International Fellowship by the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

The $20,000 grant will support her dissertation research at KU for one year. Shafique is the fourth architecture department student to receive this honor in recent years.

“I am grateful to AAUW for awarding me the fellowship, which will support my research activities and dissertation writing over the course of the next year," Shafique said. “I am deeply committed to employing the knowledge and design expertise that comes from this research to improve the lives and living conditions of the low-income working women of Bangladesh.”

Her research addresses the post-World War II transnational diffusions of urban planning. During this period the U.S.’s foreign policy of modernization initiated a wide range of cultural projects in developing nations.

It also examines American planning pioneer Catherine Bauer’s struggle to establish the 1937 U.S. Housing Act in the face of the Great Depression, demonstrating that the public housing movement not only worked to ameliorate the living conditions of low-income working class citizens of the U.S. but also gave rise to a new generation of empowered women.

“Sabrina’s work is exactly what our school’s vision calls for: global impact and engagement with communities,” said School of Architecture, Design & Planning Dean Mahesh Daas. “Her work will help empower the most underprivileged women in Bangladesh. We are very proud of her and that she has received this well-deserved fellowship.”

Last year Shafique received the KU Summer Research Fellowship, which funded her archival research at the University of California Berkeley, and won the KU Graduate Research Competition Award for the 2015-16 academic year.

Shafique began her doctoral studies at the Department of Architecture in 2012 after earning a master's degree in Architecture: Interpretation and Theories at the University of East London and a bachelor's degree in architecture at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

The American Association of University Women has awarded more than 3,000 International Fellowships since 1917. They are awarded for full-time study or research in the United States to women who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents.