The purpose of the Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill Endowed Fellowship (BBSEF) is to support women scholars and their collaborators, scholars of any gender who mentor women students, or scholars of any gender whose work focuses on women.
Scholars who support our purpose
The primary applicant must (1) be a current Utah Valley University employee and (2) tenured or on the tenure-track. Other things being equal, preference will be given, first, to a candidate who has not received a BBSEF award; second, to a candidate without tenure; and third, to a candidate who received a BBSEF award the longest ago. Teams are allowed and can include non-tenure-track faculty and/or staff. There must be one student worker of any gender, with teams of student workers allowed. Student workers may be at the graduate or undergraduate level and must be enrolled during each semester of funding. Priority will be given to applications that include the same student worker(s) across the entire funding period.
This category supports any scholarly or creative work that will be carried out by one or more women students on any topic while under the direct supervision of one or more faculty mentors of any gender.
This category supports any scholarly or creative work that focuses on women, broadly. This category will also support collaborations and teams including all scholars of any gender.
The primary applicant must (1) be a current Utah Valley University employee and (2) tenured or on the tenure-track. Other things being equal, preference will be given, first, to a candidate who has not received a BBSEF award; second, to a candidate without tenure; and third, to a candidate who received a BBSEF award the longest ago. Teams are allowed and can include non-tenure-track faculty and/or staff. There must be one student worker of any gender, with teams of student workers allowed. Student workers may be at the graduate or undergraduate level and must be enrolled during each semester of funding. Priority will be given to applications that include the same student worker(s) across the entire funding period.
There will be a single award made with a maximum possible budget of $10,000. All budgets must include funding for one or more student worker, who must be paid a living wage. The minimum salary for the student worker must use the value specified in the MIT Living Wage Calculator for one adult with zero children.
Note: Even if you have other funding awards for the project you are proposing, you can still apply for this award.
The application process will include a research project proposal, which will be evaluated by a faculty committee who will make the award recommendation. The committee will be composed of UVU faculty who may not be familiar with your area of expertise; thus, please avoid jargon and explain field-specific assumptions.
Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Ph.D. is a Professor Emerita of Psychology at Brigham Young
University where she was the Director of the Women’s Research Institute for sixteen
years. Previously, she served twenty-five years as a professor and department chair
in the Graduate School of Fordham University at Lincoln Center in New York City. Her
professional accomplishments earned her Fellow status in both the American Psychological
Association and the Association for Psychological Science.
Dr. Ballif-Spanvill’s research publications and papers initially examined the delicate dance between thoughts and feelings that motivate people to continue to learn, to engage in violence, or to create peaceful interactions with others. These studies led to the development of a multidimensional model of human motivation that provides diagnostic profiles of expectations of outcomes and probabilities of personal success.
From analyzing the motives of group terrorists to those of female poets who wrote heart-rending pleas for peace, she found patterns of thinking and feeling that form the roots of violent and peaceful actions. Wanting to track down the origins of these thoughts and feelings, she studied the minds of young children where she found gender differences in motivation for aggressive and prosocial behavior in three-year-olds. The long-term insidious effects of gender-based violence result in inequities she found faced by women in rural Mali where some are last to be fed, denied health care, and abused in their homes. Further striking evidence of the impact of violence against women over time was found in studies that empirically link the security of women and the security of state.
In an attempt to try to find a way to end at least one prevalent way women suffer, she focused on trying to reduce intergenerational domestic violence. By studying the impact of watching violence between parents on their children’s emotions, self-concepts, and behavior in common conflicts with peers, she was able to precisely identify thoughts and feelings that motivate violence so they could be addressed and changed into thoughts and feelings that create peace. Based on these understandings, she designed techniques to increase peacefulness in the minds of children, where it begins. Teaching children to be peaceful is just one of women’s weapons of peace she uncovered.
In addition to over 200 publications and papers, she is known for her work as coeditor of A Chorus for Peace: A Global Anthology of Poetry by Women (2002), revealing women’s experiences with violence and their resilient visions of peace; as coauthor of The PEACEABILITIES Program: Compelling Stories and Activities that Develop Abilities of Children to Live Peacefully with Others (2010); and as coauthor of Sex and World Peace (2012), demonstrating that in countries where women are treated poorly, that country is more likely to resort to violence to solve international crises.
Dr. Ballif-Spanvill gratefully acknowledges the enormous contributions of co-investigators, research assistants, and students in these works.
On a personal note, Dr. Ballif-Spanvill recalls that from the moment she was born in Provo, Utah in 1940, she felt out of sync. Her four siblings were all born within five years, and ten years later she came along. When asked how many children she had, her mother would answer, “Four and one more.” Bonnie often wondered if she were part of the family or an add on, like their dog. In elementary school, she was by far the youngest and the tallest in her class. After a move to New Zealand at fourteen, she was the only American in her English Epsom Girls Grammar School and the only white dancer among Māori entertainers on cruise ships.
When she was eighteen, she was a college freshman without a driver’s license; soon after, a female Ph.D. candidate among a cohort of men; and later, the only Mormon professor in a Jesuit University. When her husband became critically ill, she had little in common with the older wives she sat with in the hospital and was much too young to become a widow. Feeling out of sync continued throughout her life: moving to New York City, taking up yoga in her eighties, and still passionately trying to create a little peace in a world of violence.
