Weatherhead Center awards 48 grants

The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs has announced that it has awarded 48 student grants and fellowships amounting to over $100,000 for the 2004-05 academic year. Twenty grants will support Harvard College undergraduates, and 28 will support graduate students. In recent years the Weatherhead Center has significantly expanded its support for Harvard students, both increasing financial resources and the number of student awards available, and establishing new programs and seminars for students.

Twenty Harvard College juniors have received summer travel grants to support senior thesis research on topics related to international affairs. After their return in September, undergraduate associates will be encouraged to take advantage of the resources of the center, and during the spring 2005 semester the students will present their thesis research in Weatherhead Center seminars open to the Harvard community. This year’s recipients, along with their summer research projects, are as follows:

Shalini Ananthanarayanan (social studies) will travel to Mexico to study the liberalization of abortion law in Mexico City in 2000.

Ana Bracic (women’s studies) will travel to Croatia and Slovenia to conduct a comparative examination of women’s movements in two post-Yugoslavian liberal democracies.

Peter Brown (sociology and Romance languages) will travel to Brazil to explore identity formation and marginalization among Brazilian immigrants.

Miranda Dugi (government) will travel to El Salvador and within the United States to explain the successful transformation of the guerrilla coalition in El Salvador into a political party.

Ariel Fox (history and literature) will travel to the United Kingdom and France to study French India (Pondicherry) through British and French archives – the British Library and the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer.

Lindsey Freeman, a Rogers Family Research Fellow (social studies), will travel to Uganda to research women’s organizations and their efforts in peacemaking and reconstruction in Uganda.

Christina Givey (social anthropology) will travel to Guatemala to study the impact and perceptions of the Commission for Historical Clarification.

Jody Kelman (social studies) will travel to Australia to determine why countries tighten their asylum policies, using the Australian case to develop a model.

Itumeleng Makgetla, a Rogers Family Research Fellow (social studies), will travel to South Africa to research large South African banking groups’ involvement in low-income housing finance and internationalizing tendencies.

Ayla Matanock (social studies) will travel to Peru, Mexico, and Spain to compare Sendero Luminoso, Zapatistas, and ETA to find factors that make groups more likely to use terror.

Susan Mathai (social studies) will travel to Cuba to study the politics and economics of immunization programs, with particular attention to their relation to Cuban nationalism.

Peter McMurray (Slavic studies and classics) will travel to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to study nationalism and religious identity as captured in oral literature and folk culture.

David Mericle (economics and history) will travel to China to study migrant workers and the impact of foreign investment on that country.

Aaron Mihaly (government) will travel to Bolivia to investigate the causes of the October 2003 coup against Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.

Mika Morse (social studies) will travel to Nicaragua to investigate the experiences of women entrepreneurs who have received micro-financing and are self-financed in order to evaluate the efficacy of micro-credit programs and their impact on the lives of women.

Sabeel Rahman, a Rogers Family Research Fellow (social studies), will travel to Bangladesh to study political protest movements among the poor and marginalized in Dhaka and examine the ways in which citizenship rights are rendered more substantive in a rapidly modernizing, elite-dominated society.

Michael Rosenberg (social studies) will travel to Mexico to investigate why NAFTA has not created lead firms in Mexico’s maquila garment industry.

Manik Suri (government) will travel to India, as well as in the United States, to conduct an interview-based study on the causal factors driving the strengthening of Indo-U.S. relations between 1998 and 2004.

Trayan Trayanov, a Rogers Family Research Fellow (social studies), will travel to the Philippines to study family-owned conglomerates and the prospects for restructuring the Philippine economy.

Sixiao Xu (applied math and economics) will travel to Paris to build a quantitative model of capital flow from European nations to developing countries using OECD data to test the model.

Sidney R. Knafel Fellow

The Weatherhead Center’s 2004-05 Sidney R. Knafel Fellow will be Orly Lobel, a Harvard University doctoral candidate in law. Lobel’s dissertation explores the potential of regulatory innovation in the new political economy, arguing that the legal process is at a critical juncture between the traditional state-centered regulatory model and a new decentered governance model. The grant is named for Sidney R. Knafel, the chairman of the center’s visiting committee from 1991 to 2000.

Graduate student associates

In 2004-05 the Weatherhead Center will be home to a multidisciplinary group of 22 doctoral candidates from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences departments of Anthropology, Government, History, History and East Asian Languages, History of Science, Law, Political Economy and Government (jointly administered with the Kennedy School of Government [KSG]), the Public Policy Program at KSG, the Law School’s S.J.D. program, and the program on Administration, Planning, and Social Policy at the Graduate School of Education (GSE).

The center provides its associates with office space, computer resources, and research grants, and they participate in a variety of seminars, including their own graduate student seminars during which they present and receive feedback on their work. The Weatherhead Center Graduate Student Associates, along with their research projects, are listed below.

Daniel Aldrich, a Ph.D. candidate in government, is investigating how states learn from their interaction with citizens who resist attempts to construct state-supported, but often controversial, facilities like nuclear power plants, airports, and dams.

Tahmima Anam, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology, is conducting an ethnographic study of the Bangladesh war of independence with an emphasis on the relationship between peasant freedom fighters and urban guerilla youth during the independence movement.

Sonya Anderson, an Ed.D. candidate in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy at GSE, is conducting a quantitative study of attitudes of teachers in Benin regarding girls in the school and classroom context, and their attitudes toward gender equity policy.

Ben Ansell, a Ph.D. candidate in government, is conducting an analysis of the determinants of public investment in human capital, particularly focusing on the role of international forces.

Warigia Bowman, a Ph.D. candidate in public policy at KSG, is conducting a cross-national, comparative study of the effect of interorganizational collaboration on the development of technological infrastructure in poor and rural communities.

Michael Burtscher, a Ph.D. candidate in history and East Asian languages, is researching idealism and ideology under the Meiji State, specifically focusing on intellectual elites and the political significance of philosophy in Meiji Japan.

Pär Cassel, a Ph.D. candidate in history, is studying nation building and extraterritoriality in East Asia in the 19th century.

Mark Copelovitch, a Ph.D. candidate in government, is exploring how domestic politics within the industrialized countries shaped international responses to financial crises in the 1980s and 1990s.

Fotini Christia, a Ph.D. candidate in public policy at KSG, is seeking a theoretical approach to explain the variation among refugee (Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs) return policies pursued by the different political elites in postwar Bosnia.

Magnus Feldmann, a Ph.D. candidate in political economy and government, is analyzing the comparative political economy of post-socialist institutions, especially wage bargaining and industrial relations, and applications of varieties of capitalism to post-socialism.

Daniel Gingerich, a Ph.D. candidate in government, is researching the 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.

Zongze Hu, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology, researches the relationship between revolution and the politics of everyday life, specifically looking at changes in perceptions of the “state” in rural north China.

Orly Lobel, an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School (HLS), is the 2004-05 Sidney R. Knafel Fellow (see description above).

Manjari Miller, a Ph.D. candidate in government, studies postcolonial ideology and foreign policy, focusing on historically contingent state interests in the cases of India and China.

Abena Osseo-Asare, Ph.D. candidate in the history of science, is conducting a documentation of phyto-medical research in Ghana since 1850 in the context of the popular use of herbal medicine, tracing interactions between scientists and herbalists working to understand potent medicinal plants.

Moria Paz, an S.J.D. candidate at HLS, is studying the point of juncture between non-territorially-defined ethnic communities and international law, and diasporatic networks as they provide a novel model for international collaborative systems.

Daniel Sargent, a Ph.D. candidate in history, is conducting research on the strategic reconfiguration of U.S. leadership within the Western alliance during the Nixon administration.

Erin Simpson, a Ph.D. candidate in government, is studying the sources and effects of military strategies in modern civil wars.

Hillel Soifer, a Ph.D. candidate in government, is working on a dissertation that will describe and explain variation in the development of state power across countries in Latin America, focusing on the cases of Chile and Peru.

Shannon O’Neil Trowbridge, a Ph.D. candidate in government, is studying the impact of social security reforms on social organization and participation in Latin America.

Amy Young, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology, is conducting research on individuals and associations involved in the Moroccan women’s rights movement and their national and local negotiation of international discourses of feminism, human rights, and political Islam.

Katharine Young, an S.J.D candidate at HLS, is conducting a comparative study of the “internationalization” of modern constitutionalism – by courts and activists – and its implications for constitutional theory, positive rights, institutional legitimacy, and justice.

Predissertation grant recipients

The Weatherhead Center awarded five predissertation grants 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.

Fotini Christia, a Ph.D. candidate in public policy, will develop a multimethodological approach to understanding ethnic group alliance formation in times of civil war. She examines the cases of Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Pengyu He, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology, will develop a historical approach to the intellectual property rights of law and economic development.

John Ondrovcik, a Ph.D. candidate in history, will conduct further research for his dissertation, “The Revolutionary Other: Banditry, State Building, and Mobilization in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1918-1923.”

Daniel Sargent, a Ph.D. candidate in history, will examine the strategic reconfiguration of U.S. leadership within the Western alliance during the Nixon administration.

Erin Simpson, a Ph.D. candidate in government, will examine the sources and effects of military strategies in modern civil wars.