New Findlay Fellow headed to Oxford for graduate degree

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.

Contact Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe at e-pardoe@northwestern.edu to learn more about the Findlay Fellowship.