Global PhD Research Scholars
The Einaudi Center’s Global PhD Research Awards fund international fieldwork to help Cornell students complete their dissertations. Through a generous gift from Amit Bhatia, this new funding opportunity annually supports several PhD students during their fieldwork. Recipients hold the title of Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Scholars.
2022–23 Scholars
Tarana Chauhan
Destination: India
Factors Affecting Women’s Experience of Intimate Partner Violence in Developing Countries
Tarana Chauhan (Applied Economics and Management) will conduct focus groups with female factory workers in India to study the effect of economic and noneconomic shocks on women’s intrahousehold bargaining power and experience of intimate partner violence.
Alice Clinch
Destinations: Greece and Italy
Of Earth and Stone: Material Culture and Natural Science in the Ancient Mediterranean
Alice Clinch (History of Art and Visual Studies) will bring microscopic techniques and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy together with ancient Greek and Latin texts to better understand ancient art and architecture in Greece and Italy.
Du Fei
Destinations: India, Malaysia, and United Kingdom
Virtuous Inheritance: Gendering Economic Life and Islam in Global South Asia, 1660-1900
Du Fei (History) works on global Islam at the intersection of legal history and gender studies. His dissertation examines the transregional circulation of an array of legal and ethical texts in Persian, Urdu, Arabic, and English in India, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom.
Sampreety Gurung
Destinations: Malaysia and Nepal
Provisioning Life: The Making of Nepali Migrant Labor in Malaysia
Sampreety Gurung (Anthropology) explores labor migration from Nepal to Malaysia to investigate how people understand work, identity, and kinship in contemporary capitalist societies.
Anna Koshcheeva
Destination: Laos
Seeing Competing Futures: The Visual Culture of Cold War Laos
Anna Koshcheeva (Asian Studies) works at the intersections of the cultural history of the Cold War in Asia, visual culture, temporality, and Buddhism. Her fieldwork will analyze multiple and competing visual representations of the Cold War in Laos.
Antonio Moya-Latorre
Destinations: Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico
Performing the Alternative(s): Peripheral Cultural Infrastructures Across Latin American Cities
Antonio Moya-Latorre (City and Regional Planning) will conduct an ethnographic study of a self-organized music school near Oaxaca’s biggest landfill. He will examine equivalent organizations in Medellin and São Paulo to investigate the impact of collective artistic movements by youth living on the margins.
Darren Wan
Destinations: Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and United Kingdom
Documenting Belonging: Citizenship Claims and Bureaucratic Encounters in British Southeast Asia
Darren Wan (History) studies histories of labor migration, decolonization, and citizenship. His dissertation examines how migrant workers claimed citizenship in the newly independent states of Burma and Malaya in the 1950s and 1960s.
2021–22 Scholars
Xinyu Guan
Destination: Singapore
Heartlanders: The Making of Racial and Sexual Citizenship in Singapore's State-Constructed Housing Estates
Xinyu Guan (Anthropology) is investigating the dynamics of structural racism, sexuality, and citizenship in Singapore's urban spaces. His project is an ethnographic study of lived experiences of racialization, sexual discipline, and surveillance in the everyday spaces of interaction in Singapore's housing estates.
Vincent Mauro
Destinations: Brazil and Colombia
Party Systems and Democratic Redistribution
Vincent Mauro (Government) studies the politics of inequality. His dissertation investigates how party systems shape paths of social reform, redistribution, and economic inequality in Latin America and beyond. He is concurrently working on a project exploring the political behavior of economic elites in relation to crime, insecurity, redistribution, and democracy.
Ryan Thomas
Destination: Tanzania
Spatial Knowledge Production for Climate Adaptation Planning in Contexts of Urban Informality: Risk Mapping in Dar es Salaam
Ryan Thomas (City and Regional Planning) studies city maps' impact on climate adaptation planning. His fieldwork investigates the mapping techniques used in the World Bank’s Open Cities Africa projects to address underrepresentation of informal settlements in adaptation planning.
Anran Wang
Destinations: China, Mongolia, Japan, and Russia
The Model Borderland of Maoist China: Identity Politics and Ideological Contentions in Inner Mongolia, 1945–1966
Anran Wang (History) is researching the interaction between ethnonational identity and communist ideology in the Cold War era, concentrating on China's northeast Asian and inner-Asian borderlands. His dissertation focuses on ethnopolitical developments in Inner Mongolia between World War II and the Cultural Revolution.