It is with great pleasure that the Global History department of the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute (FMI) announces that Sarah Bellows-Blakely is a finalist for the Women’s Impact Award from the Falling Walls Foundation, The Elsevier Foundation and VolkswagenStiftung. This award is meant to support researchers whose work advances gender equality and creates tangible societal impact. 

Dr. Bellows-Blakely leads the Berlin University Alliance-funded junior research group, “Fixing the System: Analyses in the Context of the History of Science,” at the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She is also a lecturer in the MA Global History program. Her research examines how specific frameworks for gender and intersecting forms of structural oppression have and have not institutionalized over time. Her recently-published book, Girl Power? The Birth of Girl-focused Development in Nairobi (University of Chicago Press, 2025) explores how neoliberal feminism rose to dominance within the United Nations at the expense of alternative visions of gendered, economic, and intersectional justice. Bellows-Blakely completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Stanford University and Washington University in St. Louis before moving to Berlin in 2017, where she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Humboldt University. Since 2018, Bellows-Blakely has been at Freie Universität, first as a postdoctoral fellow of the DFG-funded Graduate School for Global Intellectual History and as junior research group leader since 2023.