Aisha Fuenzalida Butt is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and a CIAMS affiliate. Her research interests include the materiality of marine plastic and coastal environmental politics. Aisha’s work examines how residents of The Canary Islands, an autonomous zone of Spain, address the global problem of marine waste. She investigates how activists, scientists, and state officials mobilize around marine plastic waste. Her research joins ethnographic and archaeological methods to engage coastal Canarian communities in critically evaluating conservation projects. Her work positions the Canaries as a crucial site to understand how small islands manage ecological vulnerability and engage with planetary scale scientific and economic projects. 

Kaitlin Findlay
Director's Fellow

Kaitlin Findlay is a PhD candidate in the History Department. Her research examines the enactment of international norms of 'humane' confinement in the early twentieth century. Drawing from international, state, and community archives in five countries, Kaitlin examines the history of international humanitarian law, the politics of internationalism, and liberal empire. It interrogates the activity of international actors, like the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross and Spanish consular officials, in monitoring detention practices. Drawing on insights from memory studies, Kaitlin asks what lessons the later forgetting of this international history in public commemoration might lend for understanding other histories of forced displacement in the twentieth century.

Filip Galic

Filip Galić studies the evolving relationship between capitalist ideology post empire — as read through transnational circuits of capital, expertise, and architectural production — and the articulations of national consciousness and sovereignty in post-Ottoman Non-Aligned geographies throughout the 20th century, focusing on Yugoslav–MENA relations. Members of his doctoral committee are Esra Akcan, Tracy McNulty, and Raymond Craib.

Prior to doctoral studies at Cornell, Galić received a postgraduate degree with distinction in History and Critical Thinking from the Architectural Association in London, and B.Arch. and M.Arch. from the University of Split, FGAG. He is a licensed architect and has practiced at Alison Brooks Architects, Bjarke Ingels Group, Powerhouse Company, and Joan Alomar Arquitectura.

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Thomas Gareau-Paquette

Thomas G. Paquette is a PhD student in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research examines how post-industrial growth and educational expansion are reshaping democratic representation and party competition in post-industrial  democracies. His dissertation asks why the growing political divide between voters with and without university degrees has produced different political outcomes across Europe and North America. Rather than treating education primarily as a cultural marker, his work examines how credentials acquire political meaning through labour markets, welfare states, housing regimes, and national growth models. He has also worked extensively on European solidarity, including public opinion towards Ukraine, and on independence movements and territorial politics in Europe, especially Scotland.

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Spencer Hadley

Spencer Hadley (he/him/his) is a PhD candidate in the Department of German Studies. His dissertation project carries the provisional heading “Jazz Poetry in German Keys: Race, Gender, Sound and Transnational Exchange Since 1945.” It involves 20th and 21st century German-language poetry, prose and performance and is informed by Literary and Cultural Studies, (Jazz and Popular) Music and Sound studies, and Black European Studies. 

 

 

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Aysegul Kilinc

Ayşegül Kılınç is a PhD student and Fulbright Fellow at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the intersection of climate policy, trade, and economics, with a particular emphasis on the effects of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Beyond her academic work, she enjoys spending time in nature and crafting, and is passionate about sharing Turkish culture.

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Angela Kothe

Angela Kothe is a fifth-year PhD Candidate in the Department of Government. Her research interests include queer politics and religion in Europe and the United States. Her dissertation explores the political economy of gender inequality in the United States and the United Kingdom.

 

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Kaori Quan

Kaori Quan is a PhD student in French History. Her research centers on the intellectual history of Revolutionary France, with a particular focus on Parisian insurrections and the ways in which the process of documenting them influenced the trajectory of both modern democracy and history-writing.

 

 

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Greta Schenke

Greta Schenke is a fourth-year PhD student in Comparative Politics in the Department of Government. Her research examines the political economy of state-building, nationalism, and democratic representation, combining historical and contemporary perspectives.

Her dissertation investigates the political origins of state building in late nineteenth-century Prussia. It explores how international economic competition shaped labor-market and migration policies, asking why political elites pursued policies that imposed substantial economic costs.

In another line of her research, Greta studies questions related to democratic representation and the origins of elite accountability. Across her work, she combines quasi-experimental and mixed-methods research designs, drawing on quantitative text analysis, statistical methods, and archival research.

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Sinziana Stanciu

Sinziana Stanciu is a PhD student in the History Department at Cornell. She is studying European intellectual and economic history of the 19th and early 20th century. Her latest research projects explore the history of oil in Romania as a space of European investment and the history of the idea of productivity. She is passionate about the big ideas and problems that have driven European growth in modern history. She is also interested in podcasting! You can listen to Histories from McGraw here. 

 

Before coming to Cornell, she received her MPhil in International History at Trinity College Dublin and her BAs in History from Columbia University and Trinity. 

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Georgy Tarasenko

Georgy Tarasenko is a PhD student in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His major field of study is Comparative Politics, with minor fields in Political Thought and Methods. Previously, he was a researcher and lecturer at the Center for Institutional Studies at HSE University in Moscow and the Digital Humanities Center at ITMO University in Saint Petersburg.

Georgy is generally interested in freedom as both a theoretical and empirical phenomenon, with a particular focus on non-democratic and illiberal politics. One of his research agendas examines wartime politics, specifically investigating Russian mercenary violence in Africa and the impact of casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian war on public opinion. He explores these questions using various interdisciplinary computational approaches, including statistics, machine learning, experiments, archival methods, and GIS.

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Xinyu H. Zhang
Director's Fellow

Xinyu H. Zhang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and holds an M.A. in Icelandic Literature from the University of Iceland. He is a reader of critical theories and Far North literature (Nordic-Scandinavian texts, especially those from Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland). He seeks to learn from the poignant dialectics between literary history and natural history in narratives of uneasy settlement in the Far North. He has published on the production of contemporary Icelandic novels in relation to a pervasive “global” atmosphere of techno-environmental-economic anxiety, which is entangled with Iceland’s own postcoloniality. He has also written on the question of relation itself, through the elliptical encounters between Jacques Derrida and Édouard Glissant. He has translated many works of Icelandic literature into Chinese.

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