Press Release
June 6, 2022, updated December 14, 2022
The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA) is pleased to announce the 2022–2023 scholars and fellows of the Weatherhead Scholars Program. The twenty-three members of the 2022–2023 Weatherhead Scholars Program (WSP) cohort hail from fifteen countries and consist of six postdoctoral fellows, ten visiting scholars, and seven practitioner fellows; additionally this year there will be one WSP Summer Associate. Fields represented include political science, history, sociology, engineering, cultural diplomacy, urban design, and international relations.
The Scholars Program welcomed its first class of participants in 2017–2018; that year, visiting faculty and postdoctoral researchers joined practitioners in this successor to the long-running Fellows Program, established in 1958. Scholars and fellows spend up to one year at Harvard conducting historical or contemporary international, transnational, global, and comparative research, including policy analysis.
The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs is the largest international social science research center within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. During their time in residence, scholars and fellows contribute to the many intellectual activities of the Weatherhead Center and the broader Harvard community, participating in seminars and workshops, auditing courses, and engaging with undergraduate research assistants. The deadline for applications for the Weatherhead Scholars Program for 2023–2024 is November 1, 2022.
scholarsprogram.wcfia.harvard.edu
2022–2023 Scholars and Fellows
Doo Won Choi is the Sang-Kee Kim Fellow and a recent graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School Mid-Career Master of Public Administration Edward S. Mason Program. As a Korean diplomat, his research will focus on a constructivist theory of world state and the reunification of Korea.
Sasha de Vogel, a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow, obtained her PhD in political science in 2021 from the University of Michigan. Her research combines interests in authoritarianism, institutional politics, and collective action, with regional expertise on Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Kenneth Fann is a fellow and a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force. He is currently deputy division chief in Aiea, Hawaii.
Juan José García Sánchez, fellow, is a team leader in international relations in the field of customs at the EU Commission, Taxation and Customs Union. His project will focus on an analysis of the EU Customs Union in view of recent deglobalization trends and realignment of supply chains.
Alex Godoy is a visiting scholar from the Universidad del Desarrollo in Chile, where he is director of the Sustainability Research Center and Strategic Resource Management. His research project focuses on using sustainability science to understand the relationships between engineering, society, and sustainability.
Daniel Karell is a visiting scholar and assistant professor of sociology at Yale University. Current research interests include how social media shape instances of political unrest and violence; the role of discourse and networks in the growth of extremist online communities; and how people justify and tolerate violence against members of other groups.
David Leblang is a visiting scholar from the University of Virginia where he is a professor of politics and public policy. He studies global migration and this year will focus on the connections between climate change, food insecurity, and human mobility.
Maha Marouan is a spring 2023 visiting scholar from The Pennsylvania State University where she is associate professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and of African and African American Studies. Her research project will focus on reconstructing Moroccan women's spirtual histories.
Giovanni Matera is a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow. He earned his PhD in sociology from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His research focuses on psychiatry and democracy; community context and mental health; and hospitality and migration, particularly in Italy, Greece, and Switzerland.
Katya Maslakowski is a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow and a historian of modern Britain, the British Empire, and science and technology studies. She obtained her PhD in history from Northwestern University in 2022.
Frank I. Mueller is a visiting scholar from the University of Amsterdam in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow. His research focuses on housing and securitization in urban Latin America and beyond, particularly on social housing in Rio de Janeiro and Medellín.
Aurelio Nuño Mayer, fellow, is a Mexican politician and former minister of public education (2015–2017). His current research project focuses on comparative education reforms in democratic countries.
Tolu Ogunlesi, fellow, is a Nigerian journalist and writer. Since 2016 he has been a special assistant to the President of Nigeria on digital and new media. His research will focus on social media regulation, and digitally-mediated disinformation and misinformation.
Hendrik Onhesorge is a summer 2022 associate. He is managing director of the Center for Global Studies and a research fellow in international relations at the University of Bonn. His current book project focuses on the significance of soft power, including personal diplomacy and charismatic leadership, within German-American relations.
William Phelan, a visiting scholar in calendar year 2023, is associate professor of political science at Trinity College Dublin, and Jean Monnet Chair in EU Politics and Law. His research focuses on international organization, the politics of international law, and the European Court of Justice. His research on international law topics includes WTO dispute settlement and international human rights regimes.
María de los Ángeles Picone, a fall 2022 visiting scholar, is assistant professor of history at Boston College. She is a historian of modern Latin America with an interest in nation making, border regions, spatial history, and the environment. Her current book project examines how people in the northern Patagonian Andes created new understandings of the nation.
Matthew Reichert, a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow, received his PhD in government from Harvard University in 2022. He uses integrative research designs with tools from multiple disciplines to explore the historical political economy of nationality in Eurasia, the politics of identity in authoritarian regimes, and racial disparities in health in the United States.
Luca Maria Pesando is a visiting scholar and assistant professor of sociology and demography at McGill University. He is interested in issues of family poverty, inequality, gender, stratification, intra- and intergenerational processes, technology adoption, and interactions between life-cycle events and human capital accumulation.
Minh Trinh, a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow, received his PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022. His research focuses on the inner workings of durable development authoritarian regimes in Vietnam and China.
Isami Sawai is a postdoctoral fellow and a Cross-border Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Hosei University. He received his PhD in international history of East Asia from the London School of Economics in 2021.
Ioana Sendroiu, a former Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow, is a fall 2022 visiting scholar and assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her PhD in sociology from the University of Toronto in 2020. Her research is focused on crisis politics.
Jenny B. Spalding is a spring 2023 fellow and a petroleum engineering specialist with expertise on energy economics and corporate project economics. She has worked at Saudi Aramco, Aramco Services Company, the World Bank, Shell, and the Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
Elayne G. Whyte is a spring 2023 fellow and the former vice-minister of foreign affairs of Costa Rica (2000-2002), and permanent representative of Costa Rica to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva (2014-2020). In 2017 she presided over the United Nations Conference that negotiated and adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Petr Vašát is a visiting scholar and Marie-Skłodowska Curie researcher at the Georg-Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies at Humboldt-Universität. He is an urban designer who uses various methods and tools to undertake a comparative study of architecture/design and poverty, informality, and the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of street culture.
Konrad Zieliński is a spring 2023 fellow and current deputy director of the Polish Cultural Institute in London. As a diplomat with the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, his research will focus on public and cultural diplomacy.