2024–25 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 2024–25 cohort of Buffett Dissertation Fellows below.
LEARN MORE ABOUT BUFFETT'S DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
2024–25 Dissertation Fellows
Vidura Jang Bahadur is a photographer currently pursuing a PhD in Communication Studies in the Rhetoric and Public Culture Program at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. Bahadur's doctoral dissertation, Invisible Citizens, explores the role image-making practices play in shaping how we imagine our individual and collective identities and how these constructions influence our participation and belonging within the diverse communities and spaces we inhabit. Image-making practices refers to a set of visual technologies that inform and are part of both state practices and the encounters that characterize vernacular life. Through an ethnographic study of Indian Chinese families in India and in the Indian diaspora in the United States and Canada, Bahadur interrogates the complex and often competing forces by which individuals imagine broader collectivities and their place within them. Bahadur is also the co-founder of the Desi Chinese Project, a living archive of the Chinese community in India. Austin Bryan is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on biopolitics, and his dissertation analyzes global medical apartheid logic and practices. He has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork with healthcare workers, development aid workers, and LGBTQ+ and HIV activists in Uganda. His work has been published in the Journal of Eastern African Studies, book chapters and collaborative human rights reports with activist interlocutors. He previously worked as a Research Assistant at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, coordinating the Program of African Studies’ African Seminar (AfriSem). Before joining Northwestern, he earned a BA in Africana Studies from North Carolina State University where he was a Park Scholar. Shah Zeb Chaudhary is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Previously, he was a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University. His research focuses on emotions, affect, international relations, morality and sovereignty. Specifically, he studies how emotions have structured the U.S.-Pakistan relationship post-9/11 and is broadly interested in the study of political emotions in a global context, especially the affective dimensions of international relations. Elsa De La Rosa is a PhD candidate in History at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on the anti-Chinese sentiment in Mexico’s northwestern region. Her dissertation examines the anti-Chinese campaigns in Sonora during the first three decades of the twentieth century and explores how the discriminatory stance of the U.S. against the Chinese was viewed as a model to emulate.
Elizabeth Good is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research explores women’s representation in peace negotiations, asking how women advocate for women in peace and security spaces. Elizabeth's multi-method approach employs text analysis, formal modeling, randomized controlled trial experiments and case study research. Christopher Montague is a PhD Candidate in Black Studies at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Chris is a historian of Black political and intellectual history in the British colonial world. His dissertation investigates alternative anticolonial visions and their repression in Jamaica and Southwest Nigeria, 1938–1962. Chris' recent published writing includes "A Black Construction of Colonialism: The Black Marxist Response to Fascism in the 1930s” in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. In his spare time, Chris likes to watch football (soccer), talk politics and listen to the music of his younger years. Rachel Sarcevic-Tesanovic is a PhD candidate in History at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests revolve around slavery and colonialism; empire and diaspora; the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender; the practices and politics of race, kinship and belonging; and the role of intimate bonds and the family in the Francophone Atlantic and circum-Caribbean world in the long eighteenth century. Her dissertation explores how free women of African descent across Saint-Domingue and Louisiana ports and Senegambian entrepôts translated their intimate ties into social and economic transformations in their lives and in the slaveholding societies in which they lived. Ely Orrego Torres is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Currently, she is a Visiting PhD student at the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po-Paris. Her research agenda intertwines political theory and international relations to address questions on religion and politics in the global context. She uses an interdisciplinary approach that relies on ethnographic methods and critical theories to account for narratives of religious freedom and secularisms in the present historical context. Her dissertation studies the politics of religious freedom and secularism in the Americas by devoting attention to transnational and regional networks, particularly transnational religious networks participating in the Organization of American States (OAS). She is also interested in ecofeminist political theologies and transnational solidarities in Latin America. Her work will soon be published in Social Compass and Philosophy and Global Affairs. Rita Rongyi Lin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Radio/Television/Film’s Screen Cultures Program at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. Her research and teaching are in the areas of transnational cinemas, spatial production and practice, film theory and gender studies with a focus on contemporary East Asian media cultures. Her dissertation project examines modes of female spectatorship and/as dysfunctional elsewheres in contemporary Chinese cinemas.Aisha Valiulla is a PhD candidate in History at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She specializes in cultural exchange, knowledge production and literary culture in the Medieval Indian Ocean world. In her dissertation, titled “Sailors, Scholars, and Wonders: Arabic Scholarship and the Indian Ocean World, 900–1400,” she analyzes Arabic histories, geographies, and merchant accounts to trace the transition of the Islamic world into the Indo-Islamic world and the centrality of merchant accounts in the textual conceptualization of India.
