The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs is pleased to announce the 2023–2024 scholars and fellows of the Weatherhead Scholars Program (WSP). The twenty-seven members of the cohort consist of ten postdoctoral researchers, seven visiting scholars, and ten practitioner fellows. They hail from across the globe and across disciplines, including peace and conflict specialists from Afghanistan, Ireland, and Nigeria; career diplomats from Canada, Korea, and Poland; and researchers of urban design, migration, and economics. This year we are particularly pleased to announce the inaugural Moulay Hicham Alaoui Postdoctoral Fellow, Asmaa Elgamal, whose work will focus on Morocco’s colonial regime and contemporary green development.
Scholars and fellows spend up to one year at Harvard conducting historical or contemporary international, transnational, global, and comparative research, including policy analysis. 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. During their time in residence, they 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 2024–2025 is November 1, 2023.
2023–2024 Scholars and Fellows
Mustapha Alhassan, Fellow, works at the Neem Foundation on Global Conflict Response and Protection and the United Nations Development Program on Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding. His research looks at Indigenous knowledge systems and how they contribute to peacebuilding in Nigeria.
Paige Bollen, Raphael Morrison Dorman Postdoctoral Fellow, recently graduated from the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her project looks at how to build political solidarity across social and economic divisions in urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa.
Fabricio Chagas-Bastos, Visiting Scholar, is an assistant professor of political science and EU Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen. His project focuses on the importance of a psychologically informed account of securitization. His research will look at how non-Western states and individuals behave toward formal and informal mechanisms of global governance.
Anirvan Chowdhury, Postdoctoral Fellow, is a political scientist who recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. His book project examines how religiously conservative parties mobilize women and how that affects their personal and political agency and relates to democratic backsliding.
Paulina Derylo-Peltz, Fellow (Spring 2024), from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is a career diplomat whose research will focus on Russian disinformation activities and their effects on the perception of the war against Ukraine.
Kieran Doyle, Fellow, is an assistant director at the Edward M Kennedy Institute for Conflict Intervention in Ireland. His research examines the impact of organizational “ego” in the planning and application of meditative-type interventions as an element of the peacebuilding mission of the European Union.
Asmaa Elgamal, Moulay Hicham Alaoui Postdoctoral Fellow, recently graduated from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work will focus on exploring the security imperatives of Morocco’s colonial regime as it shapes knowledge production around Islamic land institutions and impact on contemporary green development.
Omri Elmaleh, Raphael Morrison Dorman Postdoctoral Fellow, received a PhD in history from Tel Aviv University in 2022 and was recently a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University. He will complete a socio-historical comparative study that examines the challenges faced by Muslim immigrants in transborder Southern Cone cities in Latin America in recent decades.
Natalia García Dopazo, Fellow (Fall 2023), is an urban planner whose research focuses on design from a gender and diversity perspective. Previously she worked for the government of the City of Buenos Aires and the Ministry of Public Works of Argentina, and she was recently a Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
Camille Hamidi, Visiting Scholar (Spring 2024), is a professor of political science at the University of Lyon. Her project will focus on the role of nonprofits in emergency social policies in Boston, in a comparative analysis between the United States and France.
Mohammad Isaqzadeh, Postdoctoral Fellow, recently earned a PhD in politics from Princeton University. His work centers on the impact of political violence on religiosity and how Islamic traditions are used to mitigate the adverse effects of war and displacement, in particular on intergroup reconciliation and refugees’ mental health.
Mohammad Tarikul Islam, Short-Term Scholar (Spring 2024), is an associate professor of government and politics at the Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh and has worked with the United Nations Development Programme. His project focuses on how to restart the economy and generate jobs in Bangladesh following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Aleksander Iwanicki, Fellow (Fall 2023), from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, heads the Persian Gulf Division in the Middle East and North Africa Department. He also served in Poland’s permanent representation in the United Nations and the European Union. His research focuses on diplomacy in the Middle East, particularly on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Damir Kapid, Visiting Scholar, is an associate professor of comparative politics at the University of Sarajevo. His work focuses on the processes through which democracy and authoritarianism are institutionalized in contexts of ethnic conflict, power-sharing, and democratic innovations in Southeast Europe, Southeast Asia, and East Africa.
Noam Lupu, Visiting Scholar (Fall 2023), is an associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. He will complete a manuscript on the conditions under which exposure to violence produces persistent legacies on political identities across generations.
Angélica Márquez-Osuna, Postdoctoral Fellow, recently earned a PhD in history of science from Harvard University. Her book project explores the history of beekeeping and agriculture in the American tropics, examining how agricultural innovation and technification have shaped human societies and environments.
Eve McCloud, Fellow, is a colonel in the United States Air Force. Most recently she was stationed in Qatar.
Diego Osorio, Fellow, is a Canadian diplomat and senior policy advisor on climate security, conflict, and peace. He has worked on global political and economic matters, climate change-conflict/adaptation policy, institutional/social reconstruction, civil-military coordination, and humanitarian issues. He is concurrently pursuing a doctoral degree from the University of Utrecht.
Young-Sun Park, Sang-Kee Kim Fellow, has served as the minister of the Ministry of SMEs & Startups in the Republic of Korea and as a member of the National Assembly. Recently she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her project will look at the digitalization of politics in Korea.
William Phelan, Visiting Scholar (Fall 2023), is an 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, particularly on the early years of postwar France and its influence on the foundations of European legal integration.
Engy Said, Fellow (Fall 2023), is a career diplomat in the Egyptian Foreign Service. She is also a PhD candidate at George Mason University in Peace and Conflict Resolution focusing on the political economy of conflicts, institutional structures, and power relations in the Middle East.
Maha Shehade Switat, Postdoctoral Fellow, studies settlement formation in labor courts in Israel and its impact on labor relations, power gaps, and economic stratification in the labor market. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Haifa.
Esha Sraboni, Raphael Morrison Dorman Postdoctoral Fellow, is completing a PhD in sociology and a certificate in gender and sexuality studies at Brown University. She will use the case of gender-based violence in Bangladesh to examine how social stratification is embedded in seemingly neutral laws and other technologies of governance.
Rachel Steely, Raphael Morrison Dorman Postdoctoral Fellow, recently graduated with a PhD in history from Harvard University. Her book project traces soybeans from ancient China to modern-day startups to explain how an inconspicuous legume came to pervade our everyday lives. Her work focuses on the intersections of histories of capitalism, science and technology, and the environment.
Justin Stern, Visiting Scholar, is an assistant professor of social sciences at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His research examines how transnational business and technology drive new patterns of urban development. His current research project looks at the socio-spatial implications of the business process outsourcing industry in the Philippines.
Lúcio Vinhas de Souza, Fellow, has been an advisor to the European External Action Service and to the president of the European Commission, as well as chief economist and managing director at Moody’s Investors Services. His research project will look at monetary policy since the Great Moderation in the mid-1980s, in particular vis-à-vis the global financial crisis, the COVID recession, and price shocks in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Hadas Zur, Postdoctoral Fellow, holds a PhD in geography from Tel Aviv University. Her research looks at the relationship between virtual and physical spaces in the acceleration of violence, focusing on incidents of public violence within the context of political conflict.