The Grammy and the Graduate Student: Melding Music and Scholarship

David Jewelz Photo at Little Temple

Academic fellowships are prestigious; and for graduate students who earn them, fellowships can help set the stage for illustrious careers. They are competitive. They come with money. They have titles like Fulbright and Ford.

But what really impresses people in and out of the academy is a Grammy Award—something that UW graduate student and Grammy winner Martha Gonzalez discovered at a job interview shortly after she took home the gold.

“Usually, when I talk about my music, people are like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s nice.’ But upon mentioning the Grammy her band won, eyebrows shot up.

“This time, they were all, ‘What? Really?'” she said. “They know Fulbright. They know Ford Foundation. But the Grammy seemed to get more of a reaction.”

The Price of Women’s Immigration

“The impact of immigration on the lives of women and children is rarely discussed,” said Radcliffe Dean Lizabeth Cohen as she opened the “Crossing Borders: Immigration and Gender in the Americas” conference last Thursday.

Day one of the conference began with a concert by Quetzal, a Grammy Award-winning rock band from East Los Angeles whose music takes up the social and political stories of struggling people; singer Martha Gonzalez participated in the opening night panel discussion. The conference tackled transnational identity, reproductive law, and the influence and impact of American society on immigrant children.