New Findlay Fellow headed to Oxford for graduate degree
July 17, 2023
The Office of Fellowships is thrilled to announce that
Madeline “Maddie” Brown (WCAS ’23) has been chosen as the 2023 recipient of the
Findlay Fellowship! Next year, Maddie will travel to England to earn a graduate
degree at the University of Oxford.
Maddie graduated summa cum laude and
Phi Beta Kappa with departmental honors in American studies and minors in legal
studies and English literature. Her senior thesis, “How the Imagination of
Nineteenth-Century Newspapers Made Abortion Gothic,” examined the histories and
language of nineteenth-century newspaper coverage of abortion and received the
2023 Carl Smith Prize for Outstanding Essay in American Studies. Inducted into
Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, Maddie was awarded the PBK Centennial Prize in June
for most fully embodying the intellectual, ethical, and communal values of the
organization.
During her time at Northwestern,
Maddie held a number of leadership positions on campus. She served as a fellow
at the Center for Civic Engagement, where she worked on NU Votes initiatives to
register students to vote in national, state, and local elections. As a
consultant at the Writing Place, Maddie provided writing assistance to fellow
students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. She was also the Weinberg
College Student Advisory Board Representative for American studies, and, during
her senior year, founded Northwestern Students Organizing for Reproductive
Justice in response to antiabortion activists on campus.
In addition to these roles, Maddie
worked as a research assistant for Professor Joanna Grisinger’s project on
historical airline regulation under a grant from the Baker Program in Undergraduate Research and
for Professor Sherwin Bryant under a yearlong Leopold Fellowship,
researching the lives of enslaved people in North Carolina. Finally, she had
the privilege of interning for Congresswoman Janice Schakowsky on Capitol Hill,
where she worked on issues of reproductive rights and gun control.
At
Oxford, she will study at Wadham College for a one-year Master’s in Women’s,
Gender, and Queer History, through which she plans to continue her research on
nineteenth-century abortion, print culture, and the rhetoric and politics of
reproductive choice and control. She then hopes to return to Washington, DC,
and work on issues of reproductive justice before obtaining a law degree. She is
very grateful to her professors, peers, and mentors at Northwestern for all
they taught her and to the Findlays, the Findlay Fellowship, and the
Northwestern Office of Fellowships for their support of her future studies.
The Findlay Fellowship provides financial support to a recent Northwestern undergraduate
who is pursuing graduate study in the United Kingdom. The fellowship was
created through a generous gift from Northwestern trustee Cameron Findlay
(pictured left) and his wife, Amy Scalera Findlay.
Cam Findlay is an attorney and former
senior US government official, who obtained his master’s degree at the
University of Oxford after graduating from Northwestern. He went on to earn a
law degree from Harvard Law School, where he and Amy were classmates.
Maddie is the second-ever recipient of
the fellowship, after Abigail Roston (WCAS
’22) became the inaugural winner last year and used the award to study
criminology and criminal justice at the University of Oxford.