Weatherhead names grant recipients

Sixteen Harvard College students have received summer travel grants through the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs to support their senior thesis research. The center administers an annual competition in order to award grants that help finance undergraduates with their travel for summer field research on international affairs. All grant recipients become undergraduate associates of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and present their research findings at a conference organized by the center in the spring of their senior year.

The undergraduate associates for 2008, along with their summer research projects, are as follows:

Ola Aljawhary (anthropology and Near Eastern languages and civilizations), a Samuels Family Research Fellow, will travel to Egypt to study identity notions of Palestinian refugees in Al-Arish after the breach of the border.

Julia Choe (government and economics), an undergraduate research fellow of the Program on Transatlantic Relations, will travel to Brussels, Berlin, and London to study European security and defense policy, NATO, and the military capabilities gap.

Killian Clarke (social studies and Near Eastern languages and civilizations), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, will travel to Egypt to conduct research on the Egyptian social protest movement Kefaya.

Nelli Doroshkin (government and Slavic studies), a Samuels Family Research Fellow, will travel to Brussels to research energy politics and competencies in the European Union and Russia.

Claire Guehenno (social studies and classics) will travel to Paris and London to study French laïcité in the context of the European Union and European identity.

Kyle Haddad-Fonda (history and Near Eastern languages and civilizations), will conduct archival research in Cairo and Beijing on Sino-Arab relations in the 1950s, focusing on the Bandung Conference of 1955.

Christopher Krogslund (government) will travel to Switzerland to research domestic politics and the use of the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body.

Nadira Lalji (government), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, will travel to Bangladesh and India to study variation in the internalization of international women’s rights norms.

Joseph Luna (economics and government), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, will study the political and economic determinants of ethnic identification in western Ghana.

Ariadne Medler (social studies) will travel to Guatemala and Antigua to study counterinsurgency warfare in comparative perspective from 1981 to 1983.

Ana Mendy (history) will travel to Spain and the Dominican Republic to conduct research on the Santo Domingo side of the Saint-Domingue (or Haitian) Revolution.

Andrew Miller (social studies) will travel to China to conduct research on the Chinese press coverage of North Korea.

Noah Nathan (government), a Rogers Family Research Fellow, will conduct research on the patterns and roots of ethnic conflicts in northern Ghana, 1981 to present.

John Sheffield (social studies), a Samuels Family Research Fellow, will study police brutality and internal security reform efforts in Argentina and Chile.

Jonathan Weigel (social studies) will travel to South Africa to conduct research on the impact of migrant labor on community responses to HIV prevention in Durban.

Leah Zamore (social studies) will travel to Ethiopia and Switzerland to conduct research on the level of refugee participation in the policies and programs of the United Nations High Commission of Refugees, in particular the commission’s adoption of voluntary repatriation as the ideal solution to all refugee crises.