2025–26 Buffett Dissertation Fellows: Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

2025–26 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 2025–26 cohort of Buffett Dissertation Fellows below.

LEARN MORE ABOUT BUFFETT'S DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

2025–26 Dissertation Fellows

Viola Bao

English, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Viola Bao is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literary Studies Program and English Department at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of comparative modernisms, decolonial aesthetics, transnational leftist histories, and agrarian studies. Her dissertation studies the circulation of ideas, people, and aesthetic forms during the decolonizing era (ca 1950s–80s), with a particular focus on the cultural and political impact of the Chinese Revolution across transnational networks of art-making and anti-colonial thought in the wake of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung. She is also a literary translator and a regular literary critic for leading Swedish daily newspapers.

Clay Davis

Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Clay Davis is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His research is broadly concerned with the tension between democracy and expertise. In his dissertation, Clay compares how surgeons, judges, and global health policymakers use the statistical method of meta-analysis to resolve political uncertainty. His chapter on global health introduces the concept of “P-value politics” to explain how disinvestment in intergovernmental organizations like the World Health Organization has empowered private actors called knowledge brokers to use statistical instruments as alternatives to democratic deliberation when deciding where to allocate resources.

Qin Huang

Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Qin Huang is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University, specializing in Comparative Politics and Research Methods. His research focuses on comparative political economy, institutional change, and bureaucratic politics. Methodologically, he explores how machine-learning algorithms can complement qualitative induction. His dissertation book project examines the varieties of regional economies in China, their historical evolution, and China's integration into global capitalism. It also advances a new approach to concept formation by combining quantitative clustering with qualitative typology.

Kristina Lee

Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Kristina E. Lee is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Kristina is a political sociologist whose work addresses questions of race and ethnicity, states, and power. In her dissertation, "The Transnational Racial State: Afro-descendant Inclusion and Shifting Antiracist Frameworks in Latin America after the World Conference on Racism (WCAR)," she investigates how states relationally render antiracism an ongoing discourse rather than a completionist project. She uses qualitative methods to demonstrate how state measures to include Afrodescendants help to maintain race as a global system of power. In another line of research, she examines how nonprofit status functions as a form of state coercion that draws mutual aid groups into the state's reach.

Mariana Gutierrez Lowe

English, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Mariana Gutierrez Lowe is a PhD candidate in English at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research and teaching span twentieth-and twenty-first century Indigenous and Latinx literatures, feminist theory, border studies, archival studies, and critical race theory. Her dissertation, “Maternal Ruptures: Motherwork and Embodiment in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” examines Indigenous and Latinx border literatures and their representations of maternity and dispossession. 

Anastasiya Novatorskaya

History, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Anastasiya Novatorskaya is a PhD candidate in History at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research delves into how the intimate partners (wives, girlfriends, and mistresses) of famed radical nationalist leaders either rallied women in support of nationalism or provided the basis for the movement's ideology. This dissertation argues that women were not merely facilitators of radical nationalist movements but active ideologues who shaped, reinforced, and expanded nationalist ideologies across different contexts. Her project utilizes a transnational approach from Austrian, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian case studies to demonstrate that women's influence on radical nationalist ideology is not a one-off phenomenon.

Bipin Sebastian

Communication Studies, School of Communication

Bipin Sebastian is a doctoral candidate in the Program of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University. His broad research interest is in exploring the histories and futures of how individuals and communities can live together in an egalitarian manner, while holding on to radical differences. His doctoral project is a comparative examination of the conditions, limitations, and possibilities of minoritarian politics within democracies impacted by ethno-religious majoritarianism by focusing on two cases in South Asia: Sikhs in India, and Northern Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Anuranjan Sethi

Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Anuranjan Sethi is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on the emergent forms of tech-enabled entrepreneurship in India’s informal economy, across its urban-rural divide. Anu’s dissertation situates its study in the background of India’s decade-long policy of digitalization-led economic reform traced back to Digital India, Modi government’s flagship program launched in 2015. In its techno-solutionist vision, digitalization-enabled networking of disparate technologies like biometric identity (Aadhaar), digital payments, and smartphones have contributed to redrawing the axis along which formal-informal duality is framed, leading to the emergence of what he calls India’s Digital Informal Economy.

Craig Stevens

Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Craig Stevens is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department at Northwestern University. His work seeks to express anthropological and archaeological data through creative processes and immersive experiences. Through the use of 3D digitization and innovative curatorial strategies, Craig seeks to expose broad and diverse audiences to African and African Diasporic material culture. His research leverages technologies like Virtual Reality and photogrammetry to allow for African communities to meaningfully contribute to the interpretation and curation of their globally dispersed artifacts and cultural objects. 

Dinara Urazova

Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Dinara Urazova, a native of Kazakhstan, is currently a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. She earned her BA in Political Science from the American University in Bulgaria and her MA from the Central European University. She studies the ways in which technological developments influence political power and how actors deploy and navigate novel communication technologies. Her regional concentration is the post-Soviet space with a particular focus on Russia.