Featured Student News from our Fall 2020 department newsletter, Homo Politicus. Access the newsletter archive here.

Ankita Aggarwal (level II) co-authored “Time to act on MGNREGA,” in The Indian Express.

Fernando Aquino (level III) received the Urban Studies Dissertation Award for Dominican Political Mobilization in New York City from 1991 to Present.

Andres Besserer (level II) discussed how immigrant-serving nonprofits are essential for fighting COVID-19 in a report by New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE).

Hairy Blain (level III) published “The War Always Comes Home: The American war machine has always been integral to American racism. It’s time to tear it down along with those Confederate statues,” in Foreign Policy In Focus.

Philip Johnson (level III) received a Dissertation Year Fellowship for his project, Narcommunication: The Marketing and Messaging of Organized Crime. Johnson also received a dissertation fellowship from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and a visiting fellowship from the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Johnson published two short pieces for NACLA: “Narco-terrorism charges against Maduro and the ‘Cartel of the Suns'” and “The Jakarta Method Comes to Latin America.” Finally, Johnson published “In Defense of Zombies” in Political Violence at a Glance.

Rebecca Krisel (level II) published “Consent-Based Social Dancing Spaces and the Right to the City,” in Metropolitics.

Jessica Mahlbacher (level III) received the David Garth Award for One Country, Three Interpretations: Grassroots Mobilization and Autonomy in Post-Colonial Hong Kong. Mahlbacher also appeared on the Ralph Bunch Institute’s International Horizons podcast to discuss developments in Hong Kong.

Conner Martinez (M.A.) published “Arizona Has Lost Control of the Coronavirus Pandemic” in Jacobin Magazine.

Kyong Mazzaro (level III) was named a 2020-21 Public Fellow by PublicsLab. Mazzaro also published “Orchestrating silence, winning the votes: Explaining variation in media freedom during elections” in Electoral Studies.

Ariel Mekler (level III) was co-awarded this year’s John E. Fried Memorial Fellowship in International Human Rights. She was also appointed to the
International Studies Association-LGBTQA Caucus Graduate Student Member-at-Large.

David Monda (level II) was awarded two grants from Climate Across the Curriculum and the US Foreign Policy in the Sub-Saharan Africa Project. Monda published “Why Kamala Harris is a risky pick for Joe Biden as his running mate” in Daily Nation and “Why Kenya’s membership on UNSC in 2021 is meaningless without UN reform,” in The African Courier. He was also interviewed about the impact of the RNC on the 2020 election in Voice of America, and discussed the establishment of diplomatic ties between Israel and UAE for Deutsche Welle. Monda was invited to guest host CUNY’s Gotham Center for New York City History, interviewing New York Times bestselling author Sam Roberts on his new book New York City in 44 Buildings (Bloomsbury 2019).

Nomvuyo Nolutshungu (level III) published “Accounting and Authorizing: Sexuality, Violence, and Mass Atrocity Crimes” in The SAGE Handbook of Global Sexualities (Sage 2020).

Heidi Andrea Rhodes (level III) was awarded the Graduate Center’s Harrison Award for Dissertation Completion for this year. Rhodes also published “A Decolonial Feminist Epistemology of the Bed: A Compendium Incomplete of Sick and Disabled Queer Brown Femme Bodies of Knowledge” in the Decolonial Feminisms issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies.

Jenna Russo (level III) was co-awarded this year’s John E. Fried Memorial Fellowship in International Human Rights. Russo also published “R2P in Syria and Myanmar: Norm Violation and Advancement,” in Responsibility to Protect.

Sally Sharif (level III) published “How Robust is the Authoritarian Social Contract? Social Dissent during Iran’s COVID-19 Outbreak” in POMEPS Studies. During the summer, she was a teaching assistant for two courses at the ICPSR summer program at the University of Michigan: Causal Inference and Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Finally, Sharif was awarded the Carrell Dissertation Fellowship, Center for Place, Culture and Politics Dissertation Award, and Dissertation Year Fellowship for Demobilizing and Reintegrating Ex-Combatants: Explaining Success and Failure on the National and Subnational Levels.

Merril Sovner (level III) was awarded the Braham Dissertation Fellowship for When Does Civil Society Sustain Democracy? Case Studies from Central and Eastern Europe.

Mike Stinavage (M.A.) was awarded a 2020 Fulbright Fellowship to research the legislation and implementation of organics recycling programs in Northern Spain.

Anh Tran (level III) received a Dissertation Year Fellowship for The Invisible Hand of Networked Repression. Tran also received the APSA Dissertation Improvement Grant.

Michael Villanova (M.A.) published “CUNY cuts endanger education and adjunct professors’ livelihood,” in City & State New York.

Asher Joseph Wycoff (level III) published “Between Prophecy and Apocalypse: Buber, Benjamin, and Socialist Eschatology” in Political Theory.

Ferhat Zabun (level I) published “Strategic Ambiguity: Explaining Foreign Policy Under the Erdogan Presidency” in APSA MENA Newsletter and presented at the APSA Annual Conference. Zabun and Harry Blain (level III) published an op-ed on the deportation of international students in the New York Daily News and appeared on CBS about the issue.

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