Dr. Valerie Hudson, professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, has received a 2015 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Hudson, who holds the George H. W. Bush Chair, is one of 32 fellowship winners chosen from 301 nominations and the only one from a Texas university. Hudson is part of the inaugural class of a major annual fellowship program from Carnegie Corporation that will provide support for scholars in the social sciences and humanities.
Designed to enable scholars to devote between one and two years to research and writing, the program will provide up to $200,000 to each recipient. The overarching theme for the 2015 fellowship program is Current and Future Challenges to US Democracy and International Order. Winning proposals addressed issues that included policing and race, big data and privacy, the impact of an aging population, the safety of generic drugs, and how attitudes are formed among voters. .
The Carnegie award is the result of Hudson’s study of how the status of women within a state’s social system affects its governance, security, and stability. Her research has shown that marriage customs and the way households are created are the organizing principles of a society, and as such they affect all other elements of a society and the degree to which its politics and economics are stable and resilient. An expert on international security and foreign policy analysis, Hudson was named one of the top 100 Most Influential Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine in 2009. She developed a nation-by-nation database on women (http://womanstats.org). .
Using this data, Hudson and her co-principal investigators from The WomanStats Project have published a wide variety of empirical work in several major academic journals linking the security of women to the security of states. Her next book, The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy, will be published in June by Columbia University Press. In the book, Hudson and her co-author, Patricia Leidl, argue that far from being a “soft” foreign policy issue, the poor treatment of women worldwide poses a threat to global prospects for peace and therefore a direct threat to US national security—a position first articulated by former Secretary of State and current presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton. A free e-book preview chapter of The Hillary Doctrine is available from Amazon.com here. Dr. Hudson said she was honored to be among the inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellows. .
“I greatly appreciate the support that will enable me to further what I hope will be seen as path-breaking research linking the security and status of women to national-level outcomes in stability, security, and governance.” Bush School Dean Ryan Crocker, who nominated Hudson for the fellowship, noted that she has a well-deserved international reputation for innovative and relevant research. “The Carnegie Fellowship is yet another recognition of the impact Dr. Hudson’s work has on important policy deliberations,” Crocker said. “We are delighted to have the university’s first Carnegie Fellow on our faculty.”
