Gautam Bisht

School of Education and Social Policy

Gautam Bisht is a PhD candidate in the School of Education and Social Policy and co-founder of the Sinchan Education and Rural Entrepreneurship Foundation, a nonprofit organization. His research focuses on designing learning environments that engage with different ways of knowing through language and literacy spaces. Aligned with the broader framework of decoloniality, he is currently involved in research projects that focus on indigenous education, migration storytelling and local knowledge systems of the Himalayan belt.

Ray Buckner

Religious Studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Ray Buckner is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Northwestern University. Ray's dissertation combines ethnographic fieldwork with art, film and fashion analysis to study the religious and aesthetic lives of queer and transgender Thai Buddhist artists in Bangkok and Berlin. Ray’s academic work is published in The Journal of Global Buddhism, Religions and The Revealer. He has also published in Lion’s Roar Magazine, Buddhadharma and The Ten Thousand Things Blog. His research interests include queer and transgender studies of religion, material religion, sensory religion, religion and art and the study of ghosts and spirits.

Issrar Chamekh

Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Issrar Chamekh is a Tunisian PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science. Her research reexamines the applicability of the democratic principle of Majority Rule with Minority Rights in contexts where “minority” is a contested concept. She is studying its varied meanings among non-majoritarian social groups in North Africa and how these shape prospects for pluralism. She loves horror, pizza and the Mediterranean Sea.

Ulaş Erdoğdu

Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Ulaş Erdoğdu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and a fellow in the Middle East and North African Studies Program. He is broadly interested in the relationship between organized violence and political order, with projects spanning civil wars, counterinsurgency, terrorism, state-building, contentious politics, state repression and political regimes. Methodologically, he is interested in multi-method research design, concept formation and measurement, conflict and protest event analysis and addressing data reliability issues in violent and authoritarian contexts. Erdoğdu's piece, "Democratization, Foreign Military Intervention, and Rebel Fragmentation in Civil War: Evidence from the PKK Insurgency in Turkey" was published in the Journal of Global Security Studies.

Neonia Glukhodid

Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Neonila Glukhodid is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science with a substantive focus on civil wars. Her project explores the impact of exposure to war-time violence on social and political attitudes. Methodologically, Neonila Glukhodid employs a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative approach with in-depth interviews.

Matej Jungwirth

Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Matej is a Czech native and a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science where he specializes in Comparative Politics and Methods. Substantively, he is interested in issues of territorial loss, forced displacement, collective memory, narratives of victimhood and legacies of trauma and violence. Prior to joining Northwestern, Matej earned an MPA degree in Public Policy from Princeton University and a BA in International Relations and Comparative Literature from Beloit College. Outside of his research, Matej enjoys exploring a variety of sports and outdoor pursuits with his son including climbing, baseball, soccer, tennis, hiking and camping (preferably in Wisconsin state parks).

Angad Singh

English, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Angad Singh is a PhD candidate in the Department of English interested in post-colonialism and queer studies. His dissertation leverages oral, material, and literary archives to examine the role played by imperialism and nationalism in constructing sexuality in modern South Asia. 

Xi Wang

Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Xi Wang is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University and is currently training at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. She is broadly interested in the culture and institution of mental health, especially in a transnational context. Her dissertation explores how Chinese practitioners and Western psychoanalysts co-construct the field of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy in contemporary China through transnational psychoanalytic training.