Students

Graduate Fellows

2024-2025 PIIRS Graduate Fellows

Friedrich Asschenfeldt, History
“The Hungry Power: The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union on World Grain Markets, 1891-1991”
Alonso Burgos, Comparative Literature
“Scenes of Confrontation: Realism and Documentation in the Mexican Novel of the Last Century”
Kelly Carlton, Religion
“Children in Medieval Chinese Buddhism: Discourses on Ethics and Practice”
Bianca Centrone, History
“Workers in Beautiful Homes: Productivism, Social Policies and Entrepreneurs in the European Industrial Borderlands, 1890s-1950s”
Isabelle Chen, French and Italian
“Born(e) Across: Migration and Translation in Contemporary Francophone Literature”
Gong Chen, Near Eastern Studies
“The land question in the "Six Provinces" of the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1914”
Lucia Filipova, Spanish and Portuguese
“Spanish Child Prodigies: The Construction of National-Popular Culture Through Media During
Filippo Gradi, East Asian Studies
“The noise of suffrage: Modern Japan in the global rise of mass politics”
Navjit Kaur, Anthropology
“Futures of Wageless Life: Work, value and Gender in the Post Colony”
Rebecca Kellawan, Architecture
“How the Interoceanic Canal Project Shaped a Settler Nation: Towards and Archaeology of Infrastructural Techniques”
Ainan Liu, French and Italian
“Barbaric Acts in French Classical Theater (ca. 1635–1755)”
Jeongmin Park, Politics
“Women after War: The Re-Gendering of Labor in Postwar Societies”
Heather Penatzer, Politics
“Internationalized Territories: The Politics and History of Altered States”
Jonathan A. Romero, Spanish and Portuguese
“Babel Berlín: a (Neo)Hispanic cultural history of East Berlin (1943 - 1992)”
Alexandra Sastrawati, Anthropology
“Ethnographic Canvases: Unveiling Multimodal Promises in Singaporean Art Therapeutics”
Dennis Schäfer, German
“From Authors to Archives: The Amanuenses of the German Romantics”
Neel Thakkar, History
“Crucible of Development: Making an Industrial Region in India's Planned Economy”
Zoey Wang, Population Research
“Three Essays on Population Aging and Family Change”

2023-2024 PIIRS Graduate Fellows

Friederike Ach, Comparative Literature
“Textually Transmitted Diseases: Literature, Illness and Early Modern Circulation”
Genevieve Allotey-Pappoe, Music
“Between Acousmatic Blackness and Blacksound: The Cultural Politics of Black Music in Spain”
Beatriz Barros, Politics
“Bad Foundations: Political Competition and Infrastructure Development in Brazil”
Michael Brill, Near Eastern Studies
“The Political Life and Afterlife of Michel 'Aflaq in Iraq”
Mengge Cao, Art and Archaeology
“Small-size Painting and its Viewership in Southern Song Dynasty China (1127–1279)”
Perry Carter, Politics
“An Impassible Road to Glory: The Politics of Territorial Loss”
Lauren Clingan, Sociology
“Intimate Interventions: Emirati Experiences of Statebuilding Feminism”
Ipseta Dey, Anthropology
“Diasporic Sensibilities: Indo-Fijian Belonging in the Sigatoka Valley ‘Farmscape’”
Adhitya Dhanapal, History
“Handloom Weaving and the Development of Capitalism in Madras, 1904-1964”
Evan Ditter, French and Italian
“At the Limits of Legibility: Transatlantic Imperialism and the French Language”
Clemens Finkelstein, Architecture
“The Architecture of Transimperial Vibrations: Environmental Control, Seismic Colonialism, and the Frequency of Life, 1898-1944”
Lindsay Griffiths Brown, English and African American Studies
“Taking Liberties: Transformative Translations Across the Black Diaspora”
Jack Guenther, History
“Hamburg, Germany, and the Problem of Interdependence, 1880-1974”
Annabelle Haynes, English and African American Studies
“Island Imaginaries: Women Writers Mapping Freedom Beyond Development in Caribbean Literature from 1980-2020”
Gregory Martin, History
“Peasants of the World, Unite!: Peasant Politics and the Transformation of Ilim-gora, 1921-1941”
Jamie O’Connell, Near Eastern Studies
“Zoroastrian Identity and Authority Formation in the Persian Rivāyats”
Rachel Richman, Near Eastern Studies
“Women's Labor and Property in the Cairo Geniza”
Wintor Scott, Classics
“Critical Groundwork for a Decolonial Philosophy of Ritual: the Originary Palimpsest of Politeia in 19th Century Discourses of Ritual Sacrifice”
Sajid Shapoo, Public and International Affairs
“Mismanagement of Savagery: Salafi Jihadism and the Causes of Indiscriminate Violence”
Shivani Shedde, Architecture
“Negotiating a Third Way: Architecture between Colony and the Nation State”
Yunxiao Xiao, East Asian Studies
“The Crafts of the Hidden Hands: Scribal Culture and the Making of Texts in Early China”

2022-2023 PIIRS Graduate Fellows

Mai Alkhamissi, Anthropology
“Revolutionary Afterlives: Inter-Generational Stories of Egyptians in Exile”
Gregory Elias Cartelli, Architecture
“Disarticulations: Architecture, Technique, and the Ethnography of Habitation in France, 1941-1955”
Min Tae Cha, History
“Political Theology of Constitutionalism: Presbyterianism, Empire, and the Politics of Reform, c.179-1880”
Saadia El Karfi Azzarone, French and Italian
“Author[iz]ing Sex in the Kingdom: Literature, Film, and Social Media’s Alliance to Address Morocco’s Sexual Misery”
Peter Giraudo, Politics
“The Idea of Trade Unionism in the Political Thought of the European Workers’ Movement”
Jannia Gómez-González, Spanish and Portuguese
“Matter/s of blackness: repetition and accumulation before, within, and around Chambacú”
Zheng Guan, History
“Making a Modern “Ancient Capital”: The Survival and Preservation of City Walls in Twentieth-Century Xi’an, China”
Yuki Haba, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
“The past, present, and future of the Culex pipiens complex mosquitoes”
Annemarie Iker, Art and Archaeology
“Secrecy in the Art of Santiago Rusiñol and the Catalan Modernistes”
Manav Kapur, History
“Bounding Nations, Making Citizens’: Evacuee Property and Citizenship in Post-Colonial South Asia (1947-65)”
Kwok-Hao Lee, Economics
“Infrastructure and market design”
Thembelani (Themba) Mbatha, English
“To Witness the Unmourned: Black Bodies and the Forgotten Traumas of 20th century Southern Africa”
Whitney Mueller, French and Italian
“Cataloguing Chaos: Lists and Overload in Sixteenth-Century French Texts”
Jamie Pelling, Near Eastern Studies
“Anxiety and Optimism in the late-Ottoman Empire”
Liqun (Zoe) Peng, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
“Evaluating low-carbon technology deployment policies to accelerate the decarbonization of China’s energy system”
Paulina Pineda, Comparative Literature
“Unfolding Zapotec multiplicity: facing loss through Xhon and Diidxazá artistic creation”
Constantine Theodoridis, History
“The Sultan’s Promise: Performing the European-Ottoman Capitulations (1590-1740)”
Grega Ulen, Comparative Literature
“Comparison without Hegemony: Nonalignment, Peripheral Realisms, and the Utopian Imagination”
Hanruo Zhang, East Asian Studies
“Imagine the Ideal Realm: Pure Land Buddhism and the Literati Culture in Song Dynasty China (960–1276 C.E.)”
Olga Zolotareva, Slavic Languages and Literatures
“Looking Through: Cinema, Photography, and the Russian Modernist Imagination”

2021-2022 PIIRS Graduate Fellows

Tyler Adkins, Anthropology
“Forms of Life and the Life of Forms in Post-Soviet Siberia”
Diana Cristobal Olave, Architecture
“Algorithmic Drawings: Architecture, Computers, and the Ethics of Exhaustion under Iberian Developmentalism (1953-1977)”
Emily Eyestone, French and Italian
“Dialect(ics) of Disaster: Catastrophe in French Caribbean History and Writing”
Yixin Gu, East Asian Studies
“The Enchantment of Erudition: Models and Manifestations of Literary Culture in Han-Wei China”
Jane Hines, Music
“Complete Fantasy: The Imagination in 19th-Century Musical Discourse”
Austen Hinkley, Comparative Literature
“Doubled Sense: Wit and Joke in German Letters”
Will Horne, Politics
“Class Dismissed: The Labour Party and the Decline of Working Class Representation”
Ruo Jia, Architecture
“Different Shades of the Concrete—French Poststructuralist Theory or Chinese Experimental Architecture”
Karolina Koziol, Anthropology
“Alienation and “Foreignization”: Encounters in Russian-Chinese Borderlands”
Fabian Krautwald, History
“Spheres of Memory: Legacies of German Colonialism in Namibia and Tanzania, 1914-1969”
Benjamin Lindquist, History
“From Text to Speech: A History of the Computer’s Voice”
Max Matukhin, Comparative Literature
“Fiction’s Truths: False Confessions and Sermons from the Roman de Renart to Chaucer’s Pardoner”
Edgar Melgar, Near Eastern Studies
“Global Positivism, Scientific Politics, and the Rise of Technocracy in the Ottoman Empire and Latin America, 1830-1914”
Jenne O’Brien, History
“Making the Manifold: Mathematical Libraries in Göttingen, Germany, 1851-1914”
Samin Rashidbeigi, Near Eastern Studies
“State of Blood: Transfusion Science, the Urban Poor, and the Making of the Modern Donor in Iran”
Ron Sadan, German
“Vigilant Readers: German Culture Criticism in the Age of the Newspaper (1890-1930)”
Amanda Savagian, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
“Communication in Complex Social Groups”
Vajdon Sohaili, Architecture
“The Shape of Unity: Modeling Settler Colonial Community Through Public Architecture and Art”
Nathan Stobaugh, Art and Archaeology
“New Media, New Masses: VALIE EXPORT’s Arts of Communication”
Zhuming Yao, East Asian Studies
“Voice of Textuality: Speech, Genre, and Speech Genres in Early China”

2020-2021 PIIRS Graduate Fellows

Renée Altergott, French and Italian
“Phonographic Imaginaries: The Birth of Sound Recording in France and the French Colonial Empire”
Shuk Ying Chan, Politics
“Postcolonial Global Justice”
Gabriella Aurora Ferrari, Slavic Languages and Literatures
“Propaganda Matters: On the Material Properties of Soviet Ideology”
Curt Gambetta, Architecture
“Substitutions of Modernity: materials and the modern home in India, 1915-present”
Soojung Han, East Asian Studies
“When China Was Gone: Identities and States of the Shatuo Turks”
Austin Hancock, French and Italian
“La Boxe contre l’ombre: Boxing and the Historical Avant-Garde”
Charlie Hankin, Spanish and Portuguese
“Break and Flow: Hip-Hop Poetics in Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti”
Caitlin Harvey, History
“Bricks and Mortar Boards: University-Building in the Settlement Empire, 1840-1920”
Matthew Honegger, Music
“Stalinist Cultural Diplomacy and the Origins of Soviet-US Musical Exchange”
Rob Konkel, History
“Building Blocs: Raw Materials and the Global Economy in the Age of Disequilibrium”
Margaret Kurkoski, Art and Archaeology
“Imperial Presence in the Villas of Roman Italy”
Matthew McDonald, History
“A Linguistic Archipelago: Style and Distinction in European French, 1740–1815”
Benjamin Murphy, Art and Archaeology
“Fieldwork: Problems of Observation and Archive in Latin American Video”
Lindsay Ofrias, Anthropology
“Healing Justice: Environmental Defenders and a Thriving Future for Amazonia”
Candela Potente, Comparative Literature
“Traveling Concepts: Psychoanalysis and the Translation of Stories”
Kaspar Pucek, History
“The Post-Communist Divergence: The Transformation of Economic Governance in Russia and Poland, c. 1965-Present”
Malavika Rajeev, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
“Modeling canine rabies to inform elimination”
Belén Unzueta, Sociology
Luciano Vanni, Art and Archaeology
“Renovation: Habsburg-Lorraine Residences in the Eighteenth Century: Prague, Brussels, and Florence”
Genie Yoo, History
“Mediating Islands: Ambon Across the Ages”

Undergraduate Fellows

2024-2025 PIIRS Undergraduate Fellows

Nsebong Adah, Undergraduate Class of 2026
Gustavo Blanco-Quiroga, Undergraduate Class of 2025
Sophia Chang, Undergraduate Class of 2025
Nivan Dhamija, Undergraduate Class of 2027
Calvin Grover, Undergraduate Class of 2027
Pia Sarah Haykel, Undergraduate Class of 2025
Kelih Henyo, Undergraduate Class of 2026
Janah Richardson, Undergraduate Class of 2026
Jaden Sharp, Undergraduate Class of 2026

2019-2020 PIIRS Undergraduate Fellows

Avner Goldstein, Classics
Chisom Ilogu, History
Amital Haas, Anthropology
Lyubomir Hadjiyski, School of Public and International Affairs
Kirsten Keels, Music
Shafaq Khan, School of Public and International Affairs
Suraj Kushwaha, Independent Study
Liam Lynch, Philosophy
Yael Marans, English
Fumika Mizuno, Politics
Hannah Smalley, Spanish and Portuguese
Jackson Vail, History

2018-2019 PIIRS Undergraduate Fellows

Kenji Cataldo, History
“Protest and Expert Knowledge in 21st Century Puerto Ricoˮ
Yousef Elzalabany, Near Eastern Studies
“Against the Nation-State: Modes of Transnational Thought in the Postcolonial Arab Worldˮ
David Friedman, Woodrow Wilson School
“Assessing the Prospects of Integration for Yemeni Migrants in South Koreaˮ
Anna Marsh, Architecture
“Roberto Burle Marx’s Flamengo Park: Pedestrian Mobility in Opposition with Modernism and Brazil’s Military Dictatorshipˮ
Rebecca Ngu, English
“The Uses of Walking: Developing a Critical Psychogeography in Londonˮ
Marah Sakkal, Architecture
“Physical Manifestations and Ontological Imaginations of Beirut’s Post-Civil Reconstruction and its Application to Syrian Civil War Reconstructionˮ
Abby Spare, English
“Noël Coward and the British Socio-Political Momentˮ
Catherine Sweeney, Sociology
“Ethnographic Study of Refugee Education in Ugandaˮ
Zoe Zeitler, Civil and Environmental Engineering
“Architectural Self-Assembly Systems to Reduce Energy and Material Consumption during Constructionˮ

2017-2018 PIIRS Undergraduate Fellows

David Exume, Sociology
“Migrant Support in HaitianCanadian Radio Stations.ˮ Research conducted in Canada.
Mariachiara Ficarelli, Anthropology
“Lost and Found in the Mediterranean: Religious Imaginaries and Colonial Ghosts between Italy and Eritrea.ˮ Research conducted in Italy.
Majida Halaweh, History
“The Tahini State(s): The Role of Tahini in Palestinian and Israeli Cuisine and Political Economy from the British Mandate to Today.ˮ Research conducted in Israel.
Sebastian Holt, Independent Concentrator, Linguistics
“Mother Tongues and Opportunity in Uttarakhand; Sociolinguistic and Pedagogical Survey.ˮ Research conducted in India.
Alexandra Kersley, History
“Justice?: The Movemento Feminino Pela Anistia and Brazil’s 1979 Amnesty Law.ˮ Research conducted in Brazil.
Devin Kilpatrick, Sociology
“Extranjero Siempre: An Ethnography of Repatriated Guatemalan-Americans in Guatemala's Capital City.ˮ Research conducted in Guatemala.
Jack Lohmann, English
“Reporting on Refugees in New Zealand.ˮ Research conducted in New Zealand.
Matthew Parodi, Politics
“Representing Indigeneity: A study on the indigenous rights movement of Taiwan through polling data and ethnic narratives in the tourism industry.ˮ Research conducted in Taiwan.
GJ Sevillano, Politics
“The Causes, Consequences, and Global Implications of the Pensionado Act of 1903: The Rise of a Second Filipino Intellectual Vanguard.ˮ Research conducted in Philippines.