Campus & Community

Weatherhead Center names 2007-08 associates

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The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs is supporting 24 doctoral candidates as Graduate Student Associates for 2007-08. The associates represent a multidisciplinary group of advanced-degree candidates from Harvard’s 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 during which they present and receive feedback on their work. Two of the Graduate Student Associates, Federico Ferrara and Sandra Sequeira, have also been awarded Weatherhead Center dissertation completion grants for the 2007-08 year.

The 2007-08 Graduate Student Associates, along with their research projects, are as follows:

Sharon Abramowitz, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology: Ethnography to examine the postconflict transition in Liberia’s medical sector from international to domestic governance.

Marcus Alexander, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government: The political economy of regime change.

Christopher Bail, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Sociology: Diverse Diversities: The configuration of symbolic boundaries against immigrants in 23 European countries.

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.

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

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.

Magnus Feldmann, Ph.D. candidate, Committee on Political Economy and Government: Postcommunist capitalism: politics, institutions, and inequality in East Central Europe.

Federico Ferrara, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government, Weatherhead Center Dissertation Completion Fellow: Getting the Parties Right: Late democratization and the paths of party system development.

Karen Grépin, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Health Policy: The international migration of health personnel, including reverse migration and the determinants of destination country selection.

Rusaslina Idrus, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology: The use of litigation and human rights framework in indigenous land claims in Malaysia; the use of transnational discourses by both the indigenous group and the state.

Diana Kudayarova, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History: Labor policy and labor-market strategies of white-collar professionals in the Soviet Union.

Janet Lewis, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government: Examining the impact of economic inequality between ethnoregional groups on the likelihood of civil conflict in Africa.

Eunmi Mun, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Sociology: Comparison of the mechanisms of occupational sex segregation in Japan and the United States by examining the processes of human capital accumulation and their legal systems.

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

Rebecca Nelson, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government: Explaining variation in the terms of sovereign debt restructurings with private creditors in the post-World War II era.

Vernie Oliveiro, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History: The United States’ efforts against the bribery of foreign public officials by multinational corporations wishing to do business abroad, 1975-97.

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.

Sabrina Peric, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Social Anthropology: Examining intersections of violence, identity, and primary resource extraction in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ethnographic present and in its history.

Sandra Sequeira, Ph.D. candidate, Committee on Public Policy, Weatherhead Center Sidney R. Knafel Dissertation Fellow: The politics of privatization in sub-Saharan Africa; political economy of institutions.

Anthony Shenoda, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology and Center for Middle East Studies: Coptic Orthodox Christian encounters with the Miraculous in Egypt.

George Soroka, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government: Variance in governmental representation of and accountability to the electorate in three case studies of postcommunist states.

Pierre-Hugues Verdier, S.J.D. candidate, Law School: Hedge funds and the international financial regulatory system.

Ann Marie Wilson, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History: An investigation into the origins of modern American human rights activism, focusing on the Anglo-American humanitarian movements that arose in response to crises in Armenia, Russia, and the Congo Free State between 1880 and 1920.