2026–27 Buffett Dissertation Fellows: Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

2026–27 Buffett Dissertation Fellows

The Buffett Dissertation Fellowship Program provides financial and programmatic support to an interdisciplinary cohort of approximately 10 Northwestern University doctoral students in years 6 and 7. Learn about the 2026–27 cohort of Buffett Dissertation Fellows below.

LEARN MORE ABOUT BUFFETT'S DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

2026–27 Dissertation Fellows

Allison Gibeily

English, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Allison Y. Gibeily is a PhD candidate in English and a cluster fellow in Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She studies Arabic travel writing and oral literary forms developed by merchants, monks, physicians, and other non-canonical authors in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bilād al-Shām. Her research aims to expand the concept of world literature by demonstrating the critical role of improvisation, practicality, and physicality in post-classical Arabic manuscripts. She is an affiliated researcher at the Orient-Institut Beirut and previously served as assistant editor at the Journal of Arabic Literature.

Amrina Rosyada

Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Amrina Rosyada is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her dissertation examines how urban citizens in Indonesia use everyday waste practices and politics—including blockade protests, waste arts, and grassroots technology—to claim their rights to a more just waste infrastructure. Her work draws on the perspective of discard studies, which understands the circulation of waste as a process that generates power dynamics in society. Focusing beyond the harmful potential of waste, her research emphasizes the importance of waste as a technopolitical locus for everyday citizenship struggles in urban Indonesia.

Emma Davis

Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Emma Davis is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on nationalism, self-determination, and religion in international politics. Her dissertation, "International Relations and the Jewish Question," reads a series of Jewish political thinkers as theorists of international order whose ideas speak directly to foundational concepts and practices of world politics. Placing these traditions of political thought in dialogue with contemporary scholarship on sovereignty, diaspora, and global order, it demonstrates that intellectual histories that have been often presumed to be outside the purview of international political thought are in fact central to it.

Jinxue Chen

Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Jinxue Chen is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests include migration, Enlightenment and empire, and the politics of classics and comparison. Her dissertation recasts the relationship between diaspora, citizen, and homeland as a question rather than a congealed present by examining the different conceptions of citizenship that exilic Chinese intellectuals developed in response to global inequality and mobility controls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Kang Kang

Comparative Literary Studies Program, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Kang Kang (Connie) is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies with a home department in Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her dissertation focuses on revolutionary pessimism in 20th-century ethnic and indigenous Sinographic literature. She received a Mellon Cluster Fellowship in Comparative Race and Diaspora and is a member of the Critical Theory and the Environment, Culture, and Society clusters. Her research has been supported by internal and external grants including from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Kansas. She worked as a graduate assistant for the Roberta Buffett Institute's Climate Crisis & Media Arts Working Group in 2022-2024 and the Shifting Shorelines Working Group in 2025.

Rebecca Rwakabukoza

History, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Rebecca Rwakabukoza is a PhD Candidate in History at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is interested in how people in modern Uganda debated and resolved inclusion and membership in a family unit. Her dissertation "Counting People, Making People Count: A History of Family-Making in Western and Southwestern Uganda 1840s-1967" focuses on group networks and the messy business of making families. She is also a Mellon Cluster Fellow in African Studies.

Ruslana Lichtzier

Art History, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Ruslana Lichtzier is a curator, critic, and doctoral candidate in Art History at Northwestern as well as a Mellon fellow in MENA Studies, and in Critical Theory Studies. Born in Russia, raised in Israel, and residing today in the US, Lichtzier’s practice originates from the non-place of migration, a condition that bestows an ethical commitment to states of statelessness. Broadly, Lichtzier focuses on the optic regimes of domination that yield various performances of the non-citizenship in the Middle East. Her work is animated by the scholarship of Michel Foucault, the Frankfurt School, Feminist New Materialisms, and Black Studies.

Tim Seida

Financial Economics, Kellogg School of Management and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Tim Seida is a PhD candidate in Financial Economics, a joint program between the Finance Department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and the Economics Department at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His research interests include household finance, financial intermediation, and mortgage markets. His dissertation uses administrative microdata and quasi-experimental methods to study the effects of Hungary's pro-natalist housing policies on fertility and housing markets. Another chapter of his dissertation studies how lender-borrower relationships shape competition, interest rates, and borrower outcomes in U.S. mortgage markets.

Xi Wang

Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Xi Wang is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She studies the transnational circulation of psychoanalysis, a practice that has receded from mainstream clinical settings in the West while flourishing in contemporary China. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, her dissertation examines how practitioners build professional authority when neither the state nor a single cultural center guarantees it, showing how global knowledge hierarchies are selectively reconstructed through transnational lineages, local relationships, and everyday professional socialization. More broadly, the project suggests that modernity does not unfold everywhere through the same institutional sequence.

Yingzhe Zhu

Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Yingzhe Zhu is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on the political economy of technology and medicine. Methodologically, she combines the interpretive depth of qualitative research with the pattern-extracting capabilities of quantitative methods. Her dissertation examines the development of online medical platforms (OMPs) in China, which enable patients to connect remotely with leading doctors across the country. She focuses on patients’ patterns of platform use, doctors’ motivations for participation, shifting dynamics of medical authority and power, and the impacts of OMPs on existing health inequalities.