The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) is proud to recognize Samuel H. Allen, M.S., LMFT, as the 2019 recipient of the Jessie Bernard Outstanding Research Proposal from a Feminist Perspective Award, which is given to a graduate student or new professional who has demonstrated excellence in research and potential contribution to feminist scholarship. His paper is titled “Redoing Gender, Redoing Family: A Qualitative Examination of Parents Negotiating Their Child’s Nonbinary Gender Identity.”

Mr. Allen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Family Science at the University of Maryland with a focus on gender and sexuality studies. Guided by a commitment to social justice, Mr. Allen’s program of research examines queer families of various permutations, racial minority families, and the intersection of the two. His dissertation, which is directed by NCFR President-Elect Leigh Leslie, Ph.D., employs both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to better understand the family environment and health of transgender and nonbinary persons.

Mr. Allen was the co-chair of the Qualitative Family Research Network and was recently elected as one of the Students and New Professionals representatives of the Feminism & Family Studies Section. He is a current member of the editorial board of Journal of Family Psychology and is both a Writing Fellow and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Maryland. His 2018 article on queer family theory, published in Journal of Family Theory & Review and co-authored with Shawn Mendez, Ph.D., was one of the top downloaded articles in the journal between January 2017 and December 2018.

Mr. Allen will be recognized for his achievement at the 2019 NCFR Annual Conference, Nov. 20-23 in Fort Worth, Texas.

This award is presented in memory of Jessie Bernard, former NCFR Board Member and pioneer in the field of feminist family studies. Jessie Bernard declared herself a feminist in 1970 and is known for her celebrated description of "his" and "her" marriages. She was a board member of the American Sociological Association, the Groves Conference on Marriage and Family, and NCFR.

The National Council on Family Relations is the premier professional association for the multidisciplinary understanding of families. NCFR has a membership of nearly 3,000 family researchers, practitioners and educators. For more information on the National Council on Family Relations or its scholarly publications, visit the NCFR website at ncfr.org.