Learn about the 2021-2022 Global Impacts Graduate Fellows below.
Art History, WCAS
Maryam Athari is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History. Her dissertation investigates the co-constitutive understanding of the relationship between the local and the global in the discourse of artistic modernism in Iran.
Political Science, WCAS
Lauren M. Baker is a PhD candidate in Political Science. Her research addresses the construction and translation of concepts of environmentalism by examining the politics of garbage in the Middle East and North Africa. She holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from The University of Texas at Austin and a BA in International Studies from Allegheny College.
Comparative Literary Studies, WCAS
Eloisa Bressan is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literary Studies, with a home department in French and Italian. Her project, “’Living Philology’: Gramsci’s literary praxis as political creativity” engages with the literary dimension of Gramsci’s political theorization, reframing literary criticism as a fundamental instrument for political creativity. Her project retraces Gramsci’s literary criticism as itself a mode of political praxis that underwent many worldwide resurgences across the humanistic social sciences of the late twentieth century, and which continues to offer a model for the re-grounding of comparative literature today.
Political Science, WCAS
Owen Brown is a PhD candidate in Political Science, focusing on international relations and political theory, and in particular the intersections between race, colonialism, and international politics. His dissertation examines how race and international order are co-constituted through discourse and practice across the spheres of international law, political economy, and security.
Sociology, WCAS
Laura Carrillo is a PhD candidate in Sociology. Her areas of interest include Inequality and Stratification, Race/Ethnicity, Housing, Education, and Qualitative Methods. Her most current research focuses on unpacking the dynamics underlying Latinx community formation and maintenance in historical and emerging Latinx destinations. She likes to spend her free time with her family and dogs (Sirius and Hermione) and volunteering.
Philosophy, WCAS
Carmen de Schryver is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy. She specializes in Phenomenology, African Philosophy, and Decolonial Theory, with an emphasis on questions of comparative methodology and canon formation. Her research explores modes of cross-cultural reading and the concept of "decolonial universality" in order to contribute to conversations about decolonizing philosophy.
Sociology, WCAS
Ángel A. Escamilla García is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. His research focuses on how migrant youth negotiate high-risk environments and violence. His current project uses ethnographic methods and interviews to explore the different strategies that Central American youth use to migrate through Mexico on their way to the United States. Since 2015, he has spent extensive time along the migrant route in Mexico and has interviewed Central American migrants, as well as a wide range of officials, aid workers, and stakeholders. His research reveals the capacity of Central American migrant youth to constantly adapt to their circumstances and challenges the characterization of migration journeys as linear events and sheds important light on the role of journeys in shaping overall migration flows.
History, WCAS
Matthew Foreman (originally from Hong Kong) is a PhD candidate in the History department. He specializes in the intellectual and social history of modern China, and his dissertation examines the historical conditions through which the concept of race-mixing emerged in the Chinese imagination.
Sociology, WCAS
Prince Grace is an interdisciplinary researcher and doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology. His work explores how knowledge practices shape social organization, power relations, and political ordering. Alongside his academic research, he produces digital reference tools including atlases, glossaries, and bibliographies that document the geography and development of global racism and other structural inequities.
Political Science, WCAS
Christa Charbonneau Kuntzelman is a PhD candidate in Political Science. Her dissertation examines variation in how urban refugees in Uganda understand their rights, restrictions, and responsibilities, and inconsistently understand the state and non-state actors who provide these; as well as examines the effects of having or lacking this knowledge. Her broader research centers on refugee representation, migration research ethics, and conceptualizing systematic inclusion of and partnership with refugees for research agenda setting, humanitarian provision, and migration policy and decision-making.
History, WCAS
Caitlin Monroe is a PhD candidate in the History department, interested in histories of education and gender. Her dissertation, “Making History: Women’s knowledge and the creation of a historical discipline in Western Uganda” looks at how various 19th-and 20th-century processes narrowed and gendered existing ideas of historical knowledge and expertise. This research is complemented by her additional interest in teaching and thinking about creative approaches to history education at the high school and undergraduate level.
Economics, WCAS
Federico Puglisi is a PhD student in Economics. He studied in Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland and Australia for his Bachelor and Master's in Economics and Finance and worked as a research analyst at the European Central Bank and the Italian Ministry of Economics before entering the Northwestern PhD program. His main research interests lie at the intersection of Macroeconomics, Time-Series/Forecasting techniques, Monetary Policy and Finance. His research currently focuses on the role of Financial Intermediaries on the transmission of Central Bank unconventional policies onto the real economy and the role of expectations on economic outcomes.
Anthropology, WCAS
Sari Ratri is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her broader research interests are in health and economic development, and her current project investigates the latest Indonesian national health policy emphasis on mitigating child “growth stunting” as an index of progress in both child health and national development. Through an ethnographic study of Indonesian healthcare workers, she will explore the cultural views of midwives, from guardians of health for society’s most vulnerable citizens to de facto economic development agents, to understand the politics of government policy transition.
Civil and Environmental Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering
Maher Said is a PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering, specializing in Transportation System Analysis and Planning, and a previous Finite Earth Initiative Fellow at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. His research interests are in behavioral analysis and choice modeling, active mobility in developing countries and near-future adoption of novel automated technologies. His current research focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on mobility and quality of life in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Transportation, Northwestern University Transportation Center, UC Berkeley and UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business.
Screen Cultures, School of Communication
Kim-Anh Schreiber is a PhD candidate in Screen Cultures. Her research interests include histories and theories of media networks and diasporic aesthetics, with a focus on the Vietnamese diaspora. Her article “Untraceable Origins, Generations of Loss: Tih-Minh’s Echoing Afterlives,” was published in Feminist Media Histories, and she is the author of the cross-genre novel Fantasy (Sidebrow, 2020). She is a member of the programming committee for the San Diego Asian Film Festival.
Sociology, WCAS
Kadek Wara Urwasi is a PhD candidate in Sociology and an Arryman Scholar. Her dissertation examines the variation of governmental responses to informal settlements in the Global South’s metropolises based on the case of Jakarta, Indonesia, by looking at the ideational dimension of the land institution and the local and community politics. Her other research includes the spatiality of communal violence and the global diffusion of the right to the city idea.