Weatherhead Center awards 60 grants and fellowships

Weatherhead Center Undergraduate Associates

Twenty-four Harvard College juniors and sophomores have received summer travel grants to support their thesis research on topics related to international affairs. After their return in September, the center will encourage these undergraduate associates to take advantage of the resources of this research environment, and during the spring 2007 semester the students will present their thesis research in Weatherhead Center seminars open to the Harvard community. The grant recipients, along with their summer research projects, are as follows:

Alexander Bevilacqua (history), a Samuels Family Research Fellow, is conducting research in France and Germany on the early development of the European International Project, 1918-1933.

Megan Camm (history and literature), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is looking at the impact of the Xhosa cattle-killing in South Africa by examining oral narratives dating back 100 years.

Leanne Gaffney (social studies) is researching the effect of storytelling in Northern Irish schools on the integration of Protestant and Catholic students.

Olivia Gage (Romance languages and literatures), a Samuels Family Research Fellow, is carrying out a cross-cultural study of barriers to maternal care in the Mayan culture and among Mayan immigrants to North Carolina.

Wei Kevin Gan (biomedical sciences), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is researching the establishment and evaluation of a pilot HIV treatment center near Durban, South Africa.

Kafui Gbewonyo (environmental science and public policy), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is conducting a comparative study of the use of wastewater in agriculture in Ghana and Kern County, California.

Joshua Gottlieb (economics) is investigating whether corruption causes socialism, using Argentina as a case study.

Norman Ho (history) is researching Christianity in late-Ming to early-Qing China.

Travis Kavulla (history), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is conducting a historical study of British colonial regulation of witchcraft and witch-finding practices in Tanzania and Nigeria.

Jinu Koola (social studies), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is conducting an investigation in India of the differential impacts of international migration and remittance behavior on Kerala’s Hindus, Muslims, and Christians and their support for the welfare state.

William Marra (government), a Samuels Family Research Fellow, is investigating newspapers’ decisions to print the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad, governments’ response, and public opinion.

Rabia Mir (social studies and Near Eastern languages and civilizations) is researching the issue of trafficking of women and children from Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates.

Xin Wei Ngiam (social studies) is studying the meaning and structure of social protest in postapartheid South Africa.

Oludamini Ogunnaike (psychology), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is conducting research in Morocco on implicit attitudes in African and colonial languages.

Hong Nhung Pham (government), a Samuels Family Research Fellow, is conducting a comparative study of anti-corruption at the level of civil society in Vietnam and Malaysia.

Jennifer Claire Provost (special concentration in urban planning and sustainable development), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is studying the environmental and economic impact of refugee camps on host communities in northern Kenya.

Ravi Ramchandani (history), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is conducting research on the transition to colonial rule in the Indian city of Madras in the late 18th century.

Rosmary Roca (government) is researching minority rights in modern liberal democracies looking at France and the United States.

Anne Romatowski (social studies), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is studying the influence of female genital cutting and local language programs on national identity in Senegal.

Caroline Sloan (history), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is conducting research on colonial Rwanda in the interwar period focusing on the effects of Belgian rule on politics and health.

Kathleen Walro (government), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is analyzing the relationship between De Beers and the South African state in 1986 and 2005.

Julia Wang (government), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, is studying the role and impact of nongovernmental organizations in the reconstruction of Rwanda.

Tina Wang (social studies), a Samuels Family Research Fellow, is researching the impact of international institutions on domestic actors in China’s international environmental policy.

Kaya Williams (anthropology) is conducting research in Peru on the women of Sendero Luminoso.

Weatherhead Center Dissertation Completion Fellows

The Weatherhead Center’s 2006-07 Dissertation Completion Fellows are Daniel Sargent and Fotini Christia. Sargent, the center’s Sidney R. Knafel Fellow, is a Harvard doctoral candidate in history. His dissertation is titled “From Internationalism to Globalism: The United States and the Transformation of International Politics, 1965-1980.” This grant is named for Sidney R. Knafel, the chairman of the center’s Visiting Committee from 1991 to 2000. Weatherhead Center Dissertation Completion Fellow Fotini Christia is a Harvard doctoral candidate in public policy. Her dissertation focuses on ethnic alliance formation during civil wars and ethnic politics, particularly in Afghanistan and Bosnia.

Graduate student associates

In 2006-07 the Weatherhead Center will be home to a multidisciplinary group of 24 doctoral candidates from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences departments of Anthropology, Government, History, Religion, and Sociology; the Kennedy School’s Public Policy Program; and the Law School’s S.J.D. program. All of the students are working on topics related to international affairs. The center provides its graduate student associates with office space, computer resources, and research grants, and they participate in a variety of seminars, including their own graduate student seminars. The Weatherhead Center Graduate Student Associates, along with their research projects, are listed below:

Marcus Alexander (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): Behavioral political economy; experimental social science; econometrics; dynamics of conflict and cooperation.

Sepideh Bajracharya (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology): How rumor, political intrigue, conspiracy theories, and prophecy mediate the relationship between neighborhood systems of justice and national-palace-level politics in Kathmandu.

Warigia Bowman (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Public Policy): Cross-national comparative study of the effect of interorganizational collaboration on the development of technological infrastructure in poor and rural communities in East Africa.

Amy Catalinac (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): The U.S.-Japan relationship; issues in Northeast Asian security; ideational sources of foreign policy change.

Sei Jeong Chin (Ph.D. candidate, Committee on History and East Asian Languages): Historical changes in relations between the practice of news making and government policy formation during the period of national crisis and nation-building that spanned the years 1931 to 1952 in modern China.

Fotini Christia (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Public Policy): Ethnic alliance formation during civil wars; ethnic politics; Afghanistan and Bosnia.

Fabian Drixler (Ph.D. candidate, Department of History): The end of Japan’s low-fertility regimes, 1650-1900; demography, discourse, and population policy.

Sarah Dryden-Peterson (Ed.D. candidate, Graduate School of Education): A randomized control trial of a school-based intervention that connects newcomers (immigrants and refugees) and longtime residents in Canada.

Asif Efrat (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): An original framework for understanding judicial development through a macroanalysis of court reforms across countries and across time.

J. Andrew Harris (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): African political economy; local governance; economic development; legacy of colonialism.

Pengyu He (J.D. candidate, Law School, and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology): Access to justice; legal aid in China; social norms and formal laws; rural women’s land rights in China.

Jee Young Kim (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Sociology): Study of variations in labor practices among Korean-funded firms in Vietnam’s footwear industry, to be explained by interfirm relations and global labor-rights movements.

Yevgeniy Kirpichevsky (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): Developing a rational choice theory of states’ uses of intelligence and counterintelligence strategies.

Siddharth Mohandas (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): Explaining the success or failure of U.S. state-building efforts in foreign interventions.

Manjari Miller (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): Postcolonial ideology and foreign policy, historically contingent state interests: the cases of India and China.

Vipin Narang (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): Nuclear and ballistic missile proliferation; provocation of superpowers; South Asian security.

Atalia Omer (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Religion): The interrelation between intra-Israeli debates over the Jewish significance of Israel and the interstate geopolitical ethnonational conflict with Palestine.

John Ondrovcik (Ph.D. candidate, Department of History): Exploration of the new cultural meanings and structures that arose out of the civil war violence in Germany and Russia from 1918 to 1923.

Sonal Pandya (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): Foreign trade and investment policies; international and comparative political economy; political economy of development.

Daniel Sargent (Ph.D. candidate, Department of History): From internationalism to globalism: The United States and the transformation of international politics, 1965-1980.

Sandra Sequeira (Ph.D. candidate, Committee on Public Policy): The politics of privatization in Sub-Saharan Africa; political economy of institutions.

Erin Simpson (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): Local dynamics of insurgencies and state/government responses to them; sources and effects of military strategies in modern civil wars; quantitative research methods.

Joseph Wicentowski (Ph.D. candidate, Department of History): A history of the “hygiene police” in modern Taiwan, from Japanese colonial rule to Chinese Nationalist rule.

Emily Zeamer (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology): How media, globalization, and traditional Buddhist ideology are influencing changing ideas about feminine duty and moral responsibility in contemporary Thailand.

Pre- and mid-dissertation grants

The Weatherhead Center awards pre- and mid-dissertation grants to graduate students who have passed preliminary exams and are conducting research on a project related to the core research interests of the center. Pre- and mid-dissertation recipients are welcome and encouraged to attend Weatherhead Center seminars that are open to the Harvard community and to connect with center fellows and faculty should that help their research. The Weatherhead Center pre- and mid-dissertation grant recipients, along with their research projects, are listed below:

Sharon Abramowitz (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology): Examination of the transition from international post-conflict governance to state sovereignty in Liberia.

Diana Allan (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology): Emergent forms of political identity and interim structures of belonging among Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon in a context of institutionalized uncertainty.

Rosalind Dixon (S.J.D. candidate, Law School): Designing constitutional dialogue: judicial review and the new commonwealth constitutionalism.

Andrew Eggers (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): The link between economic development in 19th century Japan to current debates about the political economy of development.

J. Andrew Harris (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government): The political economy of local governance: decentralization in three East African countries.

Pengyu He (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Sociology): Social norms and formal laws: rural women’s land rights in China.

Darryl Li (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology): Research on the history of the transnational Islamist movements during the Afghan-Soviet War (1974-1988).

Myles Osborne (Ph.D. candidate, Department of History): Community development, welfare, and the British Empire in Kenya, 1933-1963.

Anthony Shenoda (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology): The role of miracles among Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt, focusing on developing a sociological/anthropological notion of “mystery” that would capture the encounters Copts have with the miraculous.

Maryann Shenoda (Ph.D. candidate, Department of History and Middle Eastern Studies): An examination of medieval Egyptian manuscripts that deal with the process of Islamization and Arabization of medieval Egypt, with a particular focus on the historiographical representations of Coptic Christians in Egypt.