Scholarly persona formation and cultural ambassadorship: Female graduate students travelling between Belgium and the United States

Abstract

This contribution studies the CRB Educational Foundation’s travel programme between Belgium and the United States during the interwar years. It focuses on women’s participation in the programme and on the role of gender in the ways in which the foundation constructed and enacted ideals of being a good fellow. The scientific persona that the CRB tried to shape was twofold: scholarly and diplomatic. Candidates who combined a good academic record with strong social skills, “personality”, and potential to act as an “ambassador” were selected. The CRB officials acted with a certain awareness of the difficulties female candidates and fellows encountered. This awareness was however not shared among the CRB’s Belgian partners and did not really affect the implicitly masculine character of the persona they co-created. Indeed, the minority of female candidates and fellows faced gendered inequalities and biases that existed both in the academic and the broader social world and which hindered them, especially in Belgium, in performing the persona of the CRB fellow. Although fellows were expected to inscribe themselves into a “sexless” discourse, the exchange experience itself proved a powerful incentive to challenge that discourse.