Global PhD Research Scholars

The Einaudi Center’s Global PhD Research Grants fund international fieldwork to help Cornell students complete their dissertations. Through a generous gift from Amit Bhatia, this new grant opportunity annually supports several PhD students during their fieldwork. Recipients hold the title of Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Scholars.

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.

Lissette Lorenz

Destination: Japan

Resilience in the Anthropocene: Long-Term Visions of Recovery and Revitalization in Fukushima

Lissette Lorenz (Science and Technology Studies) is researching post-disaster revitalization efforts in Japan after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. Her work investigates how community organizers, government workers, and citizen scientists envision and carry out revitalization.

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.

Ana Ozaki

Destinations: Angola, Mozambique, Nigeria, Brazil, and Portugal

New Brazils: Architecture, Race, and Climate in the Brazilian Atlantic, 1910–1974

Ana Ozaki (Architecture) studies the racial ethics and aesthetics of Brazil's modern architecture, celebrated for its tropical adaptiveness, and its translations in Africa. Her project investigates the complex ways race has interfered in architectural understandings of climate in Brazil.

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 how city maps produce knowledge and their 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.