As a Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2004, Shelly was awarded a National Institutes of HealthNational Research Service Award to conduct research on women's body objectification. She designed a programmatic investigation of body objectification using diverse but complementary methodologies to demonstrate that the objectification of women's bodies is deeply embedded in socio-cultural world views and intersects with race/ethnicity. She was mentored in feminist psychology by Dr. Janet Hyde. At the same time, Shelly became a community organizer, directing a CODEPINK chapter in Madison, WI and was an active member of the then Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua. Through solidarity relationships with the women's social movement in Nicaragua, Grabe became learned in women of Color and “Third World” feminisms from a grassroots, decolonial perspective. She used this perspective to push a new area of inquiry into the investigation of social inequities or male dominance in a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary context. To do so, she coupled her interests in structural inequities, gender, and globalization with her research training to work with transnational women's organizations. Together they pushed new areas of inquiry that had the potential to support positive social change for women. During her postdoctoral years she was awarded a Visiting Scholar position in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and received funding from the National Science Foundation to begin an investigation in Nicaragua. This work was supported by mentor, colleague, and friend, Carlos Arenas. Professor Grabe joined the Psychology faculty at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2008. Her primary appointment is in Social Psychology, though she is affiliated with the Feminist Studies and Latin American and Latin@ Studies departments. She is also an affiliate of the University of California Global Health Initiative Center of Expertise. In addition to the strong support received from her colleagues in the Psychology department, Grabe's interests in women's human rights in a transnational context were mentored by Dr. Rosa-Linda Fregoso.
Education and jobs
Grabe received her B.A. in Psychology from Michigan State University and did her graduate studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology in 2004. She was trained in clinical psychology with a minor in quantitative statistical methods. She completed a clinical residency at the University of Washington, School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science in 2004. She received an NIH post-doc award in the Psychology department at the University of Wisconsin during 2004 and 2006 and held a Visiting Scholar position in the Women's Studies department at the University of Wisconsin Madison between 2006 and 2008. She joined the faculty at UCSC in 2008.
Accomplishments
Grabe has been a University of California DC Fellow, received a campus Excellence in Teaching Award, was awarded the Georgia Babladelis Best Paper Award from the Psychology of Women Quarterly, and has been a recipient of the Denmark-Reuder Award for Outstanding International Contributions to the Psychology of Women and Gender. Her research at UCSC has been funded by NSF, the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, the UC Global Health Initiative, the Chicano/Latino Research Cluster at UCSC, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the REED Foundation. Since her appointment at UCSC, Grabe has gained increasing international attention. In 2014 she was invited to deliver a talk at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women on gendered structural inequities and social justice. In 2015 she was invited to deliver a keynote address at the American Psychological Association convention in Toronto titled, “Gender justice in a transnational, globalized context: What’s psychology have to do with it?” Of the six invited “experts” on transnational feminism, Grabe was the only psychologist. She has also published widely in peer-reviewed outlets such as : Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, Feminism & Psychology, the Journal of Community Psychology, Psychology of Women Quarterly, and Violence Against Women. She has a forthcoming book in press by Oxford University Press titled, " Narrating a Psychology of Resistance: Voices of the Compañeras in Nicaragua" which offers a critical perspective on how the intersections of patriarchy and neoliberalism threaten women's human rights and democratic participation in society.
