Ethnic Studies PhD student Cassy Gonzalez is one of 132听outstanding scholars nationwide who have been awarded fellowships听in the 2020 competition administered by the Fellowships Office of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Gonzalez won in the Dissertation Competition, for her dissertation project, Remnants of Chattel: Black Women, Sex Trafficking, and the Criminal Justice System.听Cassy is the first person from the CU Boulder College of Arts & Sciences to ever win the prestigious Ford Fellowship, an enormous honor.
Cassy also won the Graduate School's Helen Christy Summer Fellowship and the听Beverly Sears Research Award.听The Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grants are competitive awards sponsored by the Graduate School that support the research, scholarship and creative work of graduate students from all departments at CU Boulder. The highest-ranked proposals are considered for a听Named Graduate Student Grant; Cassy won the听Eloise Timmons Award.
Cassy's research examines the phenomenon of domestic human trafficking utilizing an听intersectional criminological framework. Within this research, she focuses on the experiences of Black individuals as both victims and perpetrators of trafficking and how their intersecting identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality may interact with their experiences of exploitation and navigating the criminal legal system. Her research methods include interviewing Black women survivors of trafficking, field observations of anti-trafficking events, and a historical analysis of the evolution of slavery, sexuality, and race.听She loves dogs, getting coffee with friends, and reading anything she can get her hands on. Cassy hopes to be employed as a tenure-track professor at a historically Black college/university (HBCU) or at a criminology/criminal justice department where she听can mentor undergrads and graduate students.听
Congratulations, Cassy, on these听distinguished and much-deserved honors!
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