CONTACT: Verne Moberg
E-mail: vam1@columbia.edu
Telephone: 212-854-4015

Ms. Lucy Creagh, an Australian architect and doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been named a winner of a prestigious international scholarship offered to advance her research in Swedish cultural studies.

The $6,000 prize was awarded to Ms. Creagh at Columbia’s Deutsches Haus on Friday evening, September 17, at a traditional Swedish crayfish party sponsored by the New York chapter of the Swedish Women’s Educational Association (SWEA). Presenting the award was Ms. Christina Moliteus, President of SWEA-International, a nonprofit global organization for Swedish women and Swedish-speaking women that sponsors the annual competition.

Ms. Creagh’s dissertation is entitled “Seizing the Means of Consumption: Consumer Cooperation, The Home, and The Permeation of Modern Design Ideals in Sweden 1924 to the 1950s.”
In this work she aims to explain the role of the cooperative movement in Sweden and its influence on Swedish architecture, design, and consumption during the first decades of Swedish Social Democracy. The scholarship jury was convinced that her work will contribute significantly to the dissemination of Swedish cultural history to the English-speaking world.

Lucy Creagh’s research in Swedish architectural history has been facilitated by her Swedish language studies in the Swedish Program at Columbia, through which she was in 2001 awarded a scholarship for summer language study in Sweden given by SWEA-NY and in 2002 led to a travel grant sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study.

The Swedish Women’s Educational Association, founded in 1979, has over 8,000 members in 34 countries on five continents. For further information on SWEA and its scholarships, see vam1@columbia.edu; online: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/swedish.