Sunu Kodumthara is a Ph.D. candidate who received her B.A. from Southwestern Oklahoma State University in 2001 and her M.A. from Oklahoma State University in 2003.  Her thesis focused on three Oklahoma women – Lamar Looney, Alice Robertson, and Wilma Mankiller – and their roles as leaders in Oklahoma state and tribal politics. She is now working on her dissertation, still addressing the roles of women and politics, but now she is studying the woman suffrage movement and the American West.  Her goal is to demonstrate the leadership and the example set forth by the women in the West – a group long overshadowed in suffrage history by their Eastern counterparts.  She has presented her work at conferences including the Western Association of Women Historians.  Ms. Kodumthara has also received awards for her research, such as the A.K. Christian award from the OU History Department for Outstanding Seminar Paper.  In addition, she has received dissertation research grants from the OU History Department’s Anne Hodges and H. Wayne Morgan Dissertation Fellowship and the Huntington Library’s Helen L. Bing Fellowship.