Weatherhead Center awards 60 grants and fellowships

The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs has announced that it is awarding 60 student grants and fellowships amounting to more than $100,000 for the 2002-03 academic year. Sixteen grants will support Harvard College undergraduates, 32 grants will support graduate students, and 12 awards are being made to undergraduate and graduate student groups for their own projects. In recent years, the Weatherhead Center has increased support for Harvard students significantly, increasing both financial resources available and the number of student awards, and establishing new programs and seminars for students.

Sixteen Harvard College juniors received summer travel grants to support senior thesis research on topics related to international affairs. Following their return in September, undergraduate associates will be encouraged to take advantage of the resources of the center. During the spring 2003 semester, students will present their thesis research in Weatherhead Center seminars open to the Harvard community.

The following undergraduates are listed below along with their summer research projects.

Chris Angell (social studies) will examine the current role and operations of the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

Bernd Beber (government) will seek to explain state parties’ compliance with the rulings to the European Court of Human Rights.

Lipi Chapagain (economics) will investigate what is impeding Nepal’s development and make a comparison with other countries.

Ceridwen Dovey (anthropology) asks how constructions of ethnicity have informed, and still affect, farm-labor relations in South Africa.

Caitlin Harrington (government) will study the interaction between a rise of individual wealth and the quality of public resources in Southeast Asia.

Jenny Huang (economics) will examine the economic and social effects of large-scale school interruptions during the Cultural Revolution on subsequent labor market outcomes in China.

Scott Lee (religion and anthropology) will study the local responses to HIV/AIDS in a rural Kenyan community.

Nicole Legnani (Latin American studies and Romance languages) will research bilingual education program designs for Ciudad Gosen, Lima, redefining urban and indigenous identities in the Peruvian capital.

Leonid Peisakhin (social studies) will conduct research on Europe, the sovereign state, and the region, with an examination of the British case (Scotland and Wales), focusing on two specific policies that have been controversial.

Sandhya Ramadas (social studies) will research the evolution of the campaign to abolish the death penalty in France.

Nithya Raman (social studies) will study party appeal and efficacy in Tamil Nadu, India.

Scott Rechler (anthropology) will study grassroots environmental development initiatives in southern Chile and their community impact and relationship with external “empowerment” structures.

Dalia Rotstein (social studies) will compare Norway and Israel as counterexamples to the trend of international convergence on health system decentralization.

Lisa Schwartz (government) will conduct a comparative study on the origins of the battered-women’s movements in Great Britain and the United States.

Alfa Tiruneh (government) will study Ethiopian counterparts to Gacaca and their potential for conflict prevention.

Patrick Toomey (social studies) will conduct a study of contemporary Buddhist fundamentalist movements in Thailand.

The Sidney R. Knafel Fellowship, a dissertation completion grant, is named for Sidney R. Knafel, chairman of the Weatherhead Center’s visiting committee from 1991 to 2000. The center’s 2002-03 Knafel Fellow is Irene Bloemraad, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her project is titled “The Political Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States and Canada: Institutional Configurations, Naturalization, and Political Participation.”

In the coming year, the Weatherhead Center will be home to a multidisciplinary group of 22 doctoral candidates from the departments of Anthropology, Government, History, History and East Asian Languages, Law, Middle Eastern Studies, Population and International Health, and Sociology. These graduate students are 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 2002-03 graduate student associates are listed below with their research interests.

Alexis Albion (Department of History): The interface between fact and fiction in the trans-Atlantic depiction of espionage during the 1960s; Cold War international history; postwar Anglo-American relations; cultural and intellectual history of U.S. foreign relations.

Mary Bachman (Department of Population and International Health): Relationships between child health and subsequent morbidity and mortality in the West Africa Sahel region.

Irene Bloemraad (Department of Sociology): Comparison of immigrant political integration in the United States and Canada; exploring which factors facilitate or hinder immigrant political integration.

Christian Brunneli (Department of Government): How politics influence the development of institutions governing policing organizations in Japan and the emergence of cooperative relationships between the police and their perspective communities.

Michael Burtscher (Department of History): Idealism and ideology under the Meiji State: intellectual elites and the political significance of philosophy in Meiji Japan.

Manduhai Buyandelgeriyn (Department of Anthropology): Ethnographic study of gendered realms of shamanic practices and the larger cultural and social context that shapes these realms in rural post-socialist Mongolia.

Pär Cassel (Department of History): Nation building and extra-territoriality in East Asia in the 19th century.

Beatriz Damassiotos (Departments of History and Middle Eastern Studies): Comparative reconstruction of the urban life of Aleppo and Bursa during the 18th and 19th centuries, using crime and punishment as variables to analyze social, economic, legal, and cultural change.

Haley Dushinski (Department of Anthropology): Social experiences of violence and displacement among Kashmiri Hindu migrants living in temporary conditions in Delhi, India.

Daniel Gingerich (Department of Government): Causes of administrative reform in multiparty presidential systems in Latin America using a theoretical framework that combines a focus on pre-electoral coalition formation and illicit party financing.

Jongsoo James Lee (Departments of History and East Asian Languages): The division of Korea, 1945-1948: An international history – Soviet and U.S. policies toward Korea.

Edward Miller (Department of History): U.S. relations with South Vietnam during the tenure of President Ngo Ding Diem.

Vasiliki Neofotistos (Department of Anthropology): Ethnic identity in the post-socialist world: The creation of difference in Skopje, Macedonia.

Moria Paz (Department of Law): Point of juncture between nonterritorially defined ethnic communities and international law and diasporatic networks as they provide a novel model for international collaborative systems.

Jinbao Qian (Departments of History and East Asian Languages): Peace work during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45): A reinterpretation of politics in a divided China.

Benjamin Read (Department of Government): Comrades and neighbors: Insights from residential communities in urban China on theories of associations, networks, and governance.

Benjamin Runkel (Department of Government): Examination of how arms races lead to war by testing competing theories of casual mechanism through a combined methodology of correlative analysis and focused comparison of multiple case studies.

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

Naunihal Singh (Department of Government): To develop and test a theory concerning when attempted coups fail and when they succeed.

Kristin Smith (Department of Government): Cultural and capital: the political economy of Islamic finance in the Arab gulf.

Shannon O’Neil Trowbridge (Department of Government): The impact of social security reforms on social organization and participation in Latin America.

Lily Tsai (Department of Government): Investigation of local governance and the provision of public goods in rural China.

The center awarded eight predissertation grants and one honorary award to Harvard doctoral degree candidates who are in the early to middle stages of dissertation research projects related to international affairs. In most cases, the grants will be used during the summer for travel and other research-related expenses.

The predissertation grant and honorary award recipients are listed below with their research interests.

Abena Osseo-Asare (Department of the History of Science): Historical investigation of the transformation of plant medicine in Ghana, through a critical analysis of scientific, healing, and pharmaceutical communities.

Mark Copelovitch (Department of Government): International financial crises and global governance: the domestic sources of international cooperation.

Daniel Gingerich (Department of Government): Causes of administrative reform in multiparty presidential systems in Latin America using a theoretical framework that combines a focus on pre-electoral coalition formation and illicit party financing.

Walter Scott Gordon (Department of Population and International Health): Examination of how the centralization of control and the integration of program structures impact the levels of effectiveness and equity in immunization programs in Ghana and Uganda.

Diana Gregorio (Departments of Sociology and Organizational Behavior): Diversity as it affects the development of collective action frames in a transnational advocacy network using the lens of organizational learning.

Seunghyan Han (Department of History): Study of early 19th century Suzhou society in China as the transitional period from the state activism in the 18th to the local activism in the late 19th century.

Katerina Linos (Department of Government): The mechanisms and outcomes of the transfer of social policy programs across European countries (Spain, Belgium, Greece, and Italy).

David Singer (Department of Government): Examination of the varying ability and desire of countries to harmonize their regulations in the areas of banking and securities capital adequacy, money laundering, and securities fraud.

Hillel Soifer (Department of Government): Description of variation in state strength across region, country, and time in Latin America by testing hypotheses about state formation drawn from Europe and Africa.

The Weatherhead Center awarded grants to seven undergraduate student groups and five graduate student groups to support projects that address the groups interests in international affairs. Grants were used to support student-run conferences, speaker series, study groups, special seminars, and occasional off-campus experiences that benefit students.

The undergraduate student group grant recipients and their projects are listed below.

The Woodbridge Speaker Series, for an annual lecture; the Harvard Society of Arab Students, to fund a variety of projects (speakers, panels, and films) to educate Harvard students about Arab peoples and issues; the Project for Asian and International Relations, for a speaker panel; the Harvard International Monitoring and Action Group, to fund its “Profiles” and Web-based “Viewslinks,” which aim to inform the Harvard student community about international issues and the people behind them; the Intercollegiate Taiwanese American Students Association, for its annual undergraduate conference; the Freshman Seminar on the Latin American Political and Economic Landscape for a class trip to Nicaragua to study the political situation following the country’s elections; and the Harvard Rwanda Project, to support a research trip for six undergraduates to study Rwanda’s transitional justice system.

The graduate student group grant recipients and their projects are listed below.

Department of Government graduate students who organized a multidisciplinary graduate student workshop; the Harvard University Mexican Association for a conference titled “Political Parties and Democratic Governance in Mexico”; students who organized and participated in the annual Graduate Student International History Conference; the Harvard East Asia Society for its graduate student conference on East Asian studies; and student organizers of a conference titled “Islam in America 2002.”