Congratulations to FIIN co-ordinator Meryl Kenny (Edinburgh) who has been awarded  a prestigious PhD prize by the UK Political Studies Association for her doctoral thesis, Gendering Institutions: The Political Recruitment of Women in Post-Devolution Scotland. 

An agenda setting collection of essays, Critical Perspectives on Feminist Institutionalism, has been published in 2009 in the APSA journal Politics & Gender. The collection explores the limits and possibilities of the dominant institutionalist approaches.

Louise Chappell, Fiona Mackay and Georgina Waylen have secured funding towards a planned international workshop to be held in Sydney in March 2010. The workshop, entitled Rethinking the dynamics of political institutions: integrating gender and neo-institutionalist perspectives, is supported by the British Academy - Academy of Social Sciences in Australia Joint Project Fund, the University of Sydney International Program Development Fund, the University of Edinburgh Strategic Research Fund and the University of Sheffield. Further details will be posted shortly.

Congratulations to Mona Lena Krook, whose comparative study of on women and candidate
quotas is published by Oxford University Press in 2009. Quotas for Women in Politics is
the first book to address quotas as a global phenomenon explaining their spread and
impact in diverse contexts around the world. Described by Prof Joni Lovenduski as "the
definitive account of the political science of quotas for women", this pioneering work has already attracted much praise.

Congratulations to FIIN co-ordinator Meryl Kenny (University of Edinburgh) who is to be
awarded her doctorate after successfully defending her PhD thesis in May 2009. The thesis
is entitled 'Gendering Institutions: The Political Recruitment of Women in Post-Devolution
Scotland'.  Meryl has also been awarded a prestigious Post-doctoral Research Fellowship
(University of Edinburgh) funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The post
will run for 12 months.

The FIIN Roundtable: Feminism and Institutionalism: promising synthesis or another case of "master's tools"? attracted considerable interest at the First European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) in January. So much so, that people had to sit on the floor and the stairs!