Student News: Fall 2018

Student News: Fall 2018

Featured Student News from our 2018 department newsletter, Homo Politicus. Access the newsletter archive here.
Sumru Atuk (level III) received an International Fellowship from the American Association of University Women, a Graduate Center Dissertation Year Fellowship, and a travel grant from the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa for Politics of Femicide: “Woman” Making and Women Killing in Turkey.
Andrés Besserer Rayas’s (level I) Fulbright scholarship was renewed for the 2018-19 academic year. 
Harry Blain (level I) published four op-eds for Foreign Policy in Focus, including an analysis of economic warfare against the Gaza Strip, the decline of Congressional input on American foreign policy, and the eerie parallels between the United States in World War I and today. He also wrote an essay on declining trust in media, scientific and academic knowledge for Open Democracy’s Transformation series.
Elena Cohen (level III) is starting her tenure as President of the National Lawyers Guild in November, following her two terms as the President of the New York City Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. 
Sarah Kostecki (level III) received a short-term research position at UN Women where she will be supporting research for their “Progress of the World’s Women” report. Sarah also joined the Scholars Strategy Network where she published a policy brief about best practices in paid family leave. Finally, Sarah received a data fellowship from the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies where she will be producing a sole authored report for the Center this fall. 
Drake Logan (level III) is the M.A. Writing Fellow for AY 2018-19. He received the Dean K Harrison award from The Office of Educational Opportunity & Diversity (EOD) and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective’s Summer Dissertation Research Fellowship. 
Pierre Losson (level III) received a Graduate Center Dissertation Year Fellowship for Claiming the Remains of the Past: The Return of Cultural Heritage Objects and the Articulation of the Nation in Latin America, 1911-2011, in addition to a summer 2018 Research Travel Fellowship from the Center of Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies. In August, he also presented “The Patience of Montezuma: Building Coalitions to Claim the Return of Cultural Heritage Objects in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia” at the 10th International Conference on Cultural Policy Research in Tallinn, Estonia.
Jessica Mahlbacher (level III) received a Boren Fellowship to conduct her dissertation research and study Cantonese in Hong Kong, China.
Chris Michael (level III) received a Louis O. Kelso Fellowship for AY 2018-2019 from the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. 
Nicholas R. Micinski (level III) published “Are You A Terrorist? Comparing Security Screening for Iraqi Asylum Seekers in the US and Sweden” in International Migration, and “Refugee Policy as Foreign Policy: Iraqi and Afghan Refugee Resettlements to the United States” in Refugee Studies Quarterly. Nick also published a policy brief on “Implementing the Global Compact for Migration: The Role of States, UN Agencies, and Civil Society” with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Nick presented papers at APSA, ISA, WPSA, and a conference on “Narrating IR” in Hamburg, Germany.
David Monda (level I) received an APSA Minority Fellowship for summer research on the construction of national identity in developing contexts focusing on the Garifuna, an Afro-Belizean diaspora community in Belize. He presented “How Somali Piracy Exacerbates the Challenges of Refugee Policy in the Horn of Africa” at Baruch College’s Immigrant & Refugee Rights Conference. He was awarded the William Randolph Hearst Graduate Assistantship at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society researching diaspora transnational migrant communities with an emphasis on Belize.
Saira Rafiee (level I) published “Iran’s Quiet Counterrevolution” in Jacobin
Heidi Andrea Rhodes (level III) presented “Governing the Political: Law and the Politics of Resistance” at a workshop at the Oñati Institute for the Sociology of Law, in the Spanish Basque Country. She also presented the paper at the 2018 Hic Rosa Studio in Materialist and Decolonial Politics and Aesthetics, which took place in Brno, Czech Republic. She was also awarded the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a national first book poetry prize for latinx poets, awarded by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. 
Amy Schiller (level III) received a Mario Capelloni Dissertation Fellowship for Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy’s Anti-Political Present. She also accepted a position as faculty and Director of Development at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Sally Sharif (level I) received the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) scholarship to attend two four-week sessions of the 2018 ICPSR Summer Program at the University of Michigan. She was EITM certified for courses on Generalized Linear Models, Time-Series-Cross-Section Methods, and Survival Analysis. 
Sofia Pernilla Sedergren (M.A) received two scholarships for AY 2018/2019: the Alpha Chi 2018 Joseph E. Pryor Graduate/Alumni Fellowship and the 2018/2019 Gålöstiftelsen/Sixten Gemzéus Foundation Scholarship. 
Wilford Pinkney (level III) is a FUSE Corps fellow and working for a year in St. Louis with the Mayor’s office and other stakeholders on designing a comprehensive pretrial bail reform initiative. 
Merrill Sovner (level III) presented “Creating Constituencies for Advocacy NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe” at the APSA “Comparative Democratization” poster session.
Rosa Squillacote (level II) and Professor Lennie Feldman have a chapter titled “Police Abuse and Democratic Accountability: Agonistic Surveillance of the Administrative State” in Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies (Palgrave-Macmillan 2018).
Elizabeth Stone (level II) was the Graduate Student Host of the Methods Café at the 2018 APSA meeting in Boston, MA. The Methods Café offers graduate students an opportunity to discuss all things qualitative methods-related with experts in the field.