KU student receives prestigious doctoral dissertation award

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas doctoral candidate in history has received the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award to spend a year conducting research in Tanzania.

Alicia Houser has been granted $24,400 from the U.S. Department of Education to travel to Africa to study how Tanzanian women in small urban areas have restructured their lives and landscapes since colonization.

Each year about 100 fellows representing roughly 40 institutions receive the award from the Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays International Education programs. The doctoral dissertation fellowship program provides opportunities for doctoral candidates to engage in full-time dissertation research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies.

“The evidence that Alicia plans to gather next year from archival documents, ethnography and oral histories will allow her to write an influential social history that reflects the lives of people, especially African women, who have not been well-represented in history,” said Elizabeth MacGonagle, associate professor of history and African & African-American studies and Houser’s adviser. “Her work will help us to understand better how a range of women have drawn on their resiliency to thrive in a challenging urban environment.”

Houser will spend all of 2025 in Tanzania to explore how women have transformed the town of Moshi from a place built to serve colonial interests to an African urban center of commerce and transportation. With a population of more than 220,000, Moshi sits at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The research will support Houser’s dissertation, which examines how women across different economic spectrums have constructed their lives and reconstructed Moshi since independence from British rule in 1961. In particular, the dissertation studies how women have made claims on public and private space in Moshi in pursuit of economic advancement.

Centering on the perspectives of women across all economic classes, Houser’s research will contribute to efforts to include women from low economic classes with less formal education in the global historical record.

“I would not be able to do justice to my research topic without funding like the Fulbright-Hays that allows me to live in Tanzania long term to build and maintain relationships with the people who join my research,” Houser said.  

Previously, Houser has received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship through the Kansas African Studies Center and an International Affairs Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant.

Houser has a master’s degree in public and international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh and bachelor’s degrees in international relations and African studies from Austin College. While in Tanzania, Houser will be affiliated with the University of Dar es Salaam.

The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship Program is designed to contribute to the development and improvement of the study of modern foreign languages and area studies in the United States. The grants are part of the larger competitive Fulbright-Hays Program, which dates to 1961 when the late U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright sponsored legislation for several programs that aim to increase mutual understanding between America and the rest of the world.