Weatherhead Center awards 55 grants

The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs has announced that it is awarding 55 student grants and fellowships amounting to nearly $200,000 for the 2001-02 academic year. Fifteen grants will support Harvard College undergraduates, 34 will support graduate students, and six awards are being made to undergraduate student groups for specific projects. In recent years, the Weatherhead Center has increased support for Harvard students dramatically, nearly tripling financial resources available, doubling the number of student awards, and establishing several new programs and seminars for the students.

Fifteen Harvard College juniors received summer travel grants to support senior thesis research on topics related to international affairs. These undergraduates are listed below along with their summer research projects.

Alex Athanassiou (History) will conduct archival research on the free trade Cobden-Chevalier treaty in Britain and France.

Albert Cho (Social Studies) will study the social and political basis of successful stabilization and adjustment in Mauritius.

Sameer Doshi (Environmental Science and Public Policy) will travel to Japan and London to conduct research on Japanese and Western environmental paradigms in the international whaling controversy.

Rohit Goel (Social Studies) will research the increasing decline in the quality of governance in India in order to expose viable and inherent solutions in the existing system of governance.

Bianca Gwinn (Sociology) will conduct a cross-comparative analysis of U.S. health-care policy and its effects on access to preventive/effective treatment for breast cancer patients versus the effects of socialized medicine in England.

Jean Han (English and American Literature and Language) will travel to South Africa to access trial documents and conduct interviews of participants of the Delmas Treason Trial.

Paven Malhotra (Social Studies) will analyze how political actors in two Indian states manage diverse constituencies via their development strategies.

Matthew Milikowsky (History) will conduct research in three small former British colonies – Aden, Cyprus, and Zanzibar – to test current theories as to the cause and culture of imperialism.

Suzannah Phillips (Anthropology) will travel to Bolivia to research the motives behind the racialization of the “campesino,” the inaccuracies of this construction, and the socio-political consequences.

Robinson Ramirez (History) will study Americanization and its effect on social protest in Colombia and Panama from 1945 to 1964.

Sarah Stapleton (History) will conduct research in Cape Town, South Africa, on the development of the anti-apartheid movement in sports between 1968 and 1971.

Jovana Vujovic (Government) will explore the causes of the supremacy of civic over ethnic nationalism in the political discourse of Vojvodina, the northern province of the Republic of Serbia.

Ting Wang (Government) will study the impact of grassroots elections in urban China and the reaction of policy makers and the political elite.

Miranda Worthen (Social Studies) will conduct research on whether food relief to Somalia, the Sudan, and Ethiopia during conflict leads to higher food insecurity, protracted conflict, lower political participation, and a longer recovery period after the conflict and famine.

Xiao Wu (East Asian Studies) will study the racist attitudes reflected in the designs of the Chinese city, Qingdao, colonized by Germany in 1898.

The Knafel Fellowship is a dissertation-completion grant named for Sidney R. Knafel, the chairman of the center’s Visiting Committee from 1991-2000. The center’s 2001-02 Knafel Fellow is Gray Tuttle, a Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. His project is titled, “Religious Culture in the Politics of Modern China: Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist Participation in 20th Century Nation-Building in Asia.”

The MacArthur Transnational Security Program Scholar is a predoctoral fellowship funded by the MacArthur Foundation and awarded to a student pursuing research in the realm of transnational security. The 2001-02 MacArthur Scholar is Doireann Fitzgerald, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics. She is conducting research for two comparative essays on the United States and Europe: 1) Why do Americans work more than Europeans? Can demography, wages, and taxes explain the difference? and 2) Exchange rates and asymmetric shocks: How did Europe adjust before the European Monetary Union?

In the coming year the Weatherhead Center will be home to a multidisciplinary group of 20 doctoral candidates from the Departments of Anthropology, Economics, Government, History, History and East Asian Languages, Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, Law, Middle Eastern Studies, and Population and International Health. These graduate students are all working on topics related to international affairs. Graduate Student Associates are provided with office space, computer resources, and research grants, and they participate in a variety of seminars, including graduate student seminars, during which they present and receive feedback on their work. The 2001-02 Graduate Student Associates are listed below with their research interests.

Gabriel Aguilera (Government) works on the political economy of foreign direct-investment policy-making in Latin America since 1982, and domestic politics and the political economy of banking reform in Latin America.

Alexis Albion (History) is conducting research on the interface between fact and fiction in the transatlantic depiction of espionage during the 1960s; Cold War international history; post-war Anglo-American relations; and the cultural and intellectual history of U.S. foreign relations.

Cemil Aydin (Center for Middle Eastern Studies and History) is working on a comparative history of nationalist and internationalist thought in the Middle East and East Asia; the politics of occidentalist and orientalist writings; and the Japanese grand vision in Asia.

Mary Bachman (Population and International Health) studies relationships between child health and subsequent morbidity and mortality in the West Africa Sahel region.

Narquis Barak (Anthropology) is conducting an ethnographic and historical analysis of madness and mental illness in rural northern Vietnam, and the relationship between psychiatry, rural people, and the Vietnamese state.

Doireann Fitzgerald (Economics) is studying why Americans work more than Europeans do, and whether exchange rate flexibility helped Europe adjust to asymmetric labor market shocks before EMU.

Vanessa Fong (Anthropology) is conducting research on China’s one-child policy as a modernization strategy and its effects on individuals and society.

Bret Gustafson’s (Anthropology) work is on linkages between international aid; state bilingual-intercultural education; the cultural and political mobilization of indigenous Guarani of Bolivia; language politics; and ethnic mobilization in Latin America.

Durgham Mara’ee (Law) is conducting research on constitutional, legal, and political arrangements that regulate the relationship of the state to its various national or ethnic groups; ethnic conflict; minority rights; and the Middle East peace process.

Vasiliki Neofotistos’s (Anthropology) project is titled “Ethnic Identity in the Post-Socialist World: The Creation of Difference in Skopje, Macedonia.”

Joel Ngugi’s (Law) work focuses on the role of law in economic development; critiques of the transferability of market institutions to developing countries; economic developmentalism in international legal discourse; and the use of formal legal rules as a means of establishing viable market institutions.

Tianshu Pan (Department of Anthropology) conducts research on community building in late socialist China; transition toward a welfare state in the developing world; globalization and localism; the culture of nostalgia in the postcolonial and postsocialist contexts; and historical and ethnographic accounts of food-rationing and -consumption practices in urban China.

Ben Penglase’s (Anthropology) research covers poverty, race, and violence in urban Brazil; urban anthropology; Latin American popular culture; urban planning; and local reactions to a development project in a favela (or squatter community) in Rio de Janeiro.

Jinbao Qian’s (History and East Asian Languages) project is titled “Peace Work During the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45): A Reinterpretation of Politics in a Divided China.”

Benjamin Read’s (Government) project is titled “Comrades and Neighbors: Insights From Residential Communities in urban China on Theories of Associations, Networks, and Governance.”

Oxana Shevel (Government) studies the impact of international institutions on domestic politics in postcommunist countries; refugee and citizenship policies in East-Central Europe; human rights and democratization; and the eastward expansion of European institutions.

David Singer (Government) analyzes the international harmonization of domestic regulations in the areas of money laundering, banking, insurance, securities, and accounting.

Naunihal Singh (Government) is developing and testing a theory to determine when attempted coups fail and when they succeed.

Kristin Smith’s (Government) project is titled “Culture and Capital: The Political Economy of Islamic Finance in the Arab Gulf.”

Gray Tuttle’s (Inner Asian and Altaic Studies) project is titled “Religious Culture in the Politics of Modern China: Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist Participation in 20th Century Nation-Building in Asia.”

Eleven Predissertation Grants were awarded by the center to Harvard doctoral degree candidates who are in the early stages of dissertation research projects related to international affairs. Funding for the grants came from the Weatherhead Center and the MacArthur Foundation. In most cases, the grants will be used during the summer for travel and other research-related expenses. The grant recipients are listed below.

Alexis Albion (History) is conducting research on the popular image of the 1960s British secret service agent as a cultural conduit for social and political concerns at the national and international level.

Daniel Gingerich (Government) is studying the relationship between party systems and fiscal deficits in Latin America, specifically the Bolivian and Chilean experiences in combating fiscal deficits after structural reforms.

Clara Han (Anthropology) will ethnographically map connections between transnational psychiatric science, pharmaceutical marketing, gender experiences, and recognition of depression in political generations in poor urban communities in Santiago, Chile.

Kosuke Imai (Government) conducts research on endogenous decisions in international and comparative political studies.

Jonathan Laurence (Government) will research national identity and the domestication of minority religions and the interplay of immigration policy and “state-church” relations in postwar Europe.

Maria Martiniello (Education) studies organizational characteristics and internal efficiency of public nongovernmental organization-managed schools for low-income students in nine Latin American countries.

Benjamin Olken (Economics) will focus on what determines how Indonesian villages allocate aid for the poor based on evidence from a 1998 program that provided subsidized rice to poor families.

Tashi Rabgey (Anthropology) will research social processes of ethnic differentiation among Tibetan migrants in the Republic of China on Taiwan.

Maple Razsa’s (Anthropology) project is titled “Competing Histories: The Politics of Remembering in Contemporary Croatia, a Study of World War II Partisan Veterans Activities.”

Wendy Roth (Sociology) will study racial identities of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, how these identities change with migration to the United States and how they affect social networks and outcomes.

Jun Uchida (History) will conduct research on Japanese settlers in colonial Korea, the activities of merchants as “brokers of empire” who mediated the power relations between ordinary settlers, colonial officials, and the Korean people.

The Thyssen Fellowship, a postdoctoral grant for a German citizen sponsored by the Thyssen Foundation, has been awarded to Andreas Umland. Umland received his Ph.D. from the Free University in Berlin, and his project is titled “The Politics of Alternative Modernity in Contemporary Russia: Varieties of Fascism after the Fall of Soviet Communism.”

During the 2000-01 academic year, the Weatherhead Center offered grants to six Harvard student groups for organizing projects that address their interests in international affairs. These grants can be used to support student-run conferences, a speaker series, study groups, special seminars, or other student-proposed ideas related to international affairs and directly benefiting the Harvard undergraduate community.

During the fall semester, the center gave a grant to the Hunger Action Committee to help send Harvard students to Washington, D.C., to attend discussions facilitated by the Congressional Hunger Center with policy-makers about international hunger issues. The center supported the student group IMPACT with a grant to support the group’s annual holiday card sale, which educates students about issues and raises funds that go directly to grassroots projects in developing countries.

During the spring semester, the center awarded a grant to a freshman seminar, The Contemporary Political and Economic Landscape of Latin America, for a student trip to Peru to study the presidential elections. A grant was awarded to the Harvard Project for International Health and Development to support events focusing on the impact of AIDS on youth around the world. The Society of Arab Students was awarded a grant to support projects including a speaker series, film showings, and discussions that sought to raise awareness about Arab peoples and issues. The Center awarded a grant to Bhumi toward the costs of its newly proposed magazine on international development, which aims to increase awareness about development issues among Harvard students.