Current Fellows

Fall 2025

Sophia Balakian (Assistant Professor, School of Integrative Studies) is an anthropologist and scholar of migration. She has conducted longterm ethnographic research on refugee resettlement in Kenya and the United States. She is the author of Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship, published by Stanford University Press in 2025. 

Fellowship Project: "Refugees and the Mobility of Care"

While childcare, as a feminized domain of labor, is often ignored by social theory or considered a niche or apolitical area of study, it is at the heart of the politics of national identity and belonging. Increasingly, childcare must be understood in the context of transnational flows of people and capital. This project examines US childcare policy and practices through the lens of people who are marginal to the national imaginary: refugees from East Africa who raise families in radically new economic and social conditions than those from which they came. I investigate the failing infrastructures of care in the United States in relation to the lifeworlds of people moving across the planet and navigating the society where they make new homes.

Gail Coleman (PhD Candidate, Department of History and Art History) is a Ph.D. candidate in early US History, with a Master of Arts in US History and a certificate in women and gender studies from George Mason University.  Her concentration is in early U.S. history, especially the Revolutionary Era and the Atlantic world.  She also earned a Master of Arts in Medieval History from Catholic University, where she was a Ph.D. candidate with a focus on heresy.  Prior to pursuing her degrees in history, she was a lawyer at the Department of Labor, with a Juris Doctor degree from Boston University.    

Fellowship Project: "Fugitivity as a Freedom-Seeking Strategy for Enslaved Refugees from the Haitian Revolution"

My project will be a chapter of my dissertation on the efforts of enslaved refugees from the Haitian Revolution to obtain freedom in the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.  Specifically, I will analyze the space, territory, and mobility of runaway refugees.  With the aid of historic maps and city directories I will explore Stephanie Camp's concept of "rival geographies" in the urban environment and attempt to develop digital maps.  I also will explore what it means to be a refugee in the context of enslavement, as well as the relationship between the cultural heritage and experiences of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue and the United States.  

Arvind Geetha Christo (PhD Candidate, Sociology and Anthropology) is a Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for Social Science Research (CSSR), George Mason University. His research explores development-induced dispossession, Dalit experiences, and political shifts within the context of the Kerala Model of Development. Arvind’s work engages with issues of caste, neoliberalism, and social justice through ethnographic methods.

Fellowship Project: "Development-Induced Dispossession: Dalit Experiences and Political Shifts in the Context of the Kerala Model of Development"

My research investigates how state-sponsored land grabs driven by neoliberal policies systematically dispossess Dalits of their ancestral spaces, affecting both their physical and social environments. It examines how this dispossession not only erodes their cultural identity and political presence but also reshapes space and mobility to favor dominant castes. By exploring the intersections of caste, territory, and exclusion within the Kerala Model of Development, the study deconstructs prevailing narratives of development. Additionally, it analyzes the evolving political dynamics among Dalit communities, highlighting the politics of space as a site of power, identity, and resistance.

Amanda G Madden (Assistant Professor, Department of History and Art History) is assistant professor of History, George Mason University, and Affiliate faculty, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Using a combination of quantitative, microhistorical, and digital humanities methods, her work focuses on violence studies, political history, the history of the family, and the history of women and gender in early Modern Italy. She is the co-director of the La Sfera Project and Modeling Historical Violence. Her book, Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in November 2025. 

Fellowship Project: "Gender, Space, and Crime in Early Modern Italy"

"Gender, Space, and Crime in Early Modern Italy" explores the tangled and often fraught connections between violence, gender, space, and mobility in the courts, streets, and canals of the Venetian Republic with a focus on the cities of Venice, Verona, Padua, and Vicenza. In this book, I will examine the myriad ways men and women experienced violence and growing criminality and penalization between 1550 and 1700 with a focus on both the local - neighborhoods, parishes, and homes- and the state level - borders, boundaries, as vectored through criminal and ecclesiastical courts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this framework, mobility can be particularly equated with agency as men and women traversed borders, boundaries, and spaces despite increasing prohibitions and regulations.

Christy L Pichichero (Associate Professor, African and African American Studies) is an interdisciplinary expert in the study of slavery, empire, colonialism, Critical Race Theory, afro-feminism, and cultures of war. She is the author of The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell, 2017) and her articles on have appeared in PMLA, French Historical Studies, Modern Language Notes, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and other venues. She is the Vice President of the International Commission on the History of the French Revolution, a past president of the Western Society for French History, the recipient of the 2021 Presidential Medal for Faculty Excellence at GMU, and a public intellectual featured in major news outlets such as the BBC, NPR, NBC News, Forbes, C-SPAN, and The Hill.

Fellowship Project: "From Slavery to Stardom: Family, Freedom, and the First Black Celebrity, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George"

Grounded in methodologies of Black geography, "From Slavery to Stardom: Family, Freedom, and the First Black Celebrity, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges" is a sweeping history of movement through and navigation of different spaces in one family’s perilous, but transformative journey around the French and British empires during the age of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. Joseph Bologne (1745-1799)—famed virtuosic violinist, composer, and military officer who was born enslaved in the French colony of Guadeloupe—along with his formerly enslaved mother Nanon and free plantation owner father Georges waged their personal and collective battles against the monumental forces of their time: chattel slavery, racial policing, intersectional patriarchal oppression, and the barriers of social caste. Their interconnected trajectories tell a remarkable story of human strength, strategy, contradiction, and kinship in the face of challenges whose legacies persist today. 

Debra Lattanzi Shutika (Associate Professor, Folklore Program, Department of English) is a folklorist specializing in critical race, sense of place, and contemporary Irish Folklore. She is author of Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexico (2011, University of California Press) which won the 2012 Chicago Folklore Prize. In 2022-23 she completed a research and teaching Fulbright award in Ireland where she completed a folklore collection in the Gaeltacht (Irish speaking) communities of County Mayo exploring women and traditional agricultural practices. 

Fellowship Project: "Migration, Belonging, and Discontent in Contemporary Ireland"

This project investigates how Irish communities and migrants negotiate identity, exclusion, and belonging in response to a demographic transformation. By examining intersections of folklore and migration studies, this study will explore the cultural expressions and narratives that emerge amidst tensions over migration, housing, and resources. It will be among the first cultural analyses of Ireland’s transition from a nation defined by emigration to a country experiencing significant immigration. 

This project aligns with the theme of “Space, Territory, and Mobility” as it explores how Irish identity and community boundaries are mapped and remapped in response to migration. It explores how Irish communities and migrants negotiate belonging, exclusion, and identity amidst this demographic transformation by addressing the following questions: a) How do Irish communities express belonging, identity, and discontent in the context of increased migration; b) How do public perceptions of migration reflect historical and contemporary ideas of Irish identity; and c) In what ways do tensions over migration, housing, and resources manifest in cultural expressions or collective memory?

Spring 2026

Hernan Adasme (PhD Candidate, Department of History and Art History) is a fourth-year History Ph.D. student and a Graduate Research Assistant. He received a Master’s degree in History from the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. His research focuses on the Sporting Black Diaspora to the Southern Cone in the early twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on digital methods and data-driven history. He was awarded the Rudolf and Louise Fishel Endowed Fellowship for his work at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

Fellowship Project: "The Industries of Strength: Afro-Descended Boxers and Black Physical Entertainers in Chile, 1900-1930"

My work examines the intersection of racial ideologies, modern sports, and Black mobility through the careers of Afro-descended boxers and wrestlers in Chile from 1900 to 1930. By analyzing their experiences, I explore how the Sporting Black Diaspora intersected with the rise of modern sports in the Southern Cone, viewing this intersection as both a racial project and a commercialized cultural phenomenon. Additionally, my project aligns with the theme 'Space, Territory, and Mobility,' as it traces the cross-regional movement of Afro-descended athletes and sports dynamics. This positions the Southern Cone as a crucial, yet underrecognized, center of African diasporic activities, and underscores modern sports as a pivotal element in the mobility of Black individuals.

Angela Ho (Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History) is Associate Professor of Art History. She is the author of Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention, which focuses on the relationship between repetition and invention, the practice of collecting, and the construction of identities by artists and collectors in 17th-century Dutch Republic. Her current project explores how the Dutch East India Company’s encounters with Chinese communities in the 17th century shaped the concept of the  Asian empire in the Dutch imagination.

Fellowship Project: "The Dutch East India Company’s Encounters with Chinese Culture, 1602-1740"

Focusing on the 17th and early 18th centuries, my project analyzes how the commercial, diplomatic, and artistic interactions between the VOC and diverse Chinese groups molded Dutch perceptions of China in the period. Challenging longstanding boundaries in art history based on geography, culture, and artistic medium, my study participates in the global turn in the field of early modern visual studies. I hope to contribute to fruitful dialogue about the CHR's theme, Space, Territory, and Mobility, with my exploration of the movement of objects, people and ideas across cultures.

Jane Hooper (Professor, Department of History and Art History) is a historian of Madagascar, the Indian Ocean, and the slave trade. She has written two books: Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, and Yankees in the Indian Ocean: American Commerce and Whaling. She has also published articles about slavery and piracy. She is currently constructing a public database of slaving voyages across the Indian Ocean and Asia for the SlaveVoyages website (slavevoyages.org).

Fellowship Project: "Islands of Unfreedom: Slavery and Emancipation in the Seychelles"

"Islands of Unfreedom" focuses on the experiences of those forced to labor in the Seychelles in the years immediately prior to and after emancipation. Accounts of resistance among enslaved populations in the Seychelles reveal the ways in which people attempted to regain their freedom of movement in this age of revolution. Examining these island communities provides us with rare insight into how people envisioned and maintained linguistic, religious, and cultural practices with those beyond their borders, even while they experienced intense violence in their everyday lives. 

Mariely Lopez-Santana (Associate Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government) is Associate Professor of Political Science, specializing in comparative politics, at the Schar School of Policy and Government. Her research and teaching interests are threefold (but are centered around the State, political economy, and multilevel governance): (1) the politics and governance of welfare states, and employment and social policies in Western Europe and the United States; (2) States’ reactions to a variety of social problems, including labor market exclusion, fiscal and financial crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and gang activity; and (3) the politics, policies and governance of multilevel systems, including her current book project on the Puerto Rican debt crisis. 

Fellowship Project: "The Unincorporated Territories as Special Spaces for US Financial Markets: The Case of Puerto Rico"

Legally considered separate and unequal jurisdictions since the first decade of the 20th century, the US unincorporated territories (or as many have called them, ‘the colonies’) have been coded as “foreign in the domestic sense” by US institutions, including Courts and Congress. The Imperial logic of “foreign in the domestic sense” also applies to capital accumulation in that the unincorporated territories have been used as special spaces for extraction and the creation of markets, in part given the free flow of US capital between the mainland and the territories. In line with the aforementioned logics, the proposed project seeks to better understand an overlooked matter— in the context of free flows of capital, how did US financial actors use the unincorporated territories, particularly Puerto Rico, as special spaces for profit making? More specifically, I seek to better understand the links between the projects of US Imperial and capitalist expansion through the creation of a special “debt regime” in PR by exploring: (1) how and why this special tax-exemption regime was created and maintained by the US government, and (2) how US financial actors responded to these incentives.

Manjusha Nair (Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology) is the Director of the Global South Research Hub, the Associate Editor of Pacific Affairs for South Asia and the Himalayas, and a Justice 21 Committee member of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her research interests are Globalization and Change, Historical and Comparative Sociology, Political Economy, Critical Development Theory, Decolonizing Methods, Ethnography, India and Africa. Currently, she is preparing a book manuscript, which looks at the flurry of movements between India and Africa across the Indian Ocean and the possibilities of cosmopolitan communities.

Fellowship Project: "A Crisscross World: Africa, India, and the Indian Ocean Present"

Under the aegis of contemporary globalization, there is (once again) a flurry of movements between India and Africa across the Indian Ocean. What forms do they take? What exchanges and reciprocities do they enable? What possible communities do they create? These questions form the basis of my second book project. A search for a shared world is hurriedly becoming a necessity in the face of the existential threat to us through exclusive nationalism and climate crisis. My book looks at what communities we can imagine through the interactions of places that share a co-evalness (the quality of belonging to the same historical time) and a cosmopolitan history that predates colonialism.

Kang Seo (PhD Candidate, Schar School of Policy and Government) is a PhD Candidate in Political Science, working on a dissertation titled "Understanding the Structural Determinants of Immigrant Organizations' Policy Influence." Her research interests include democratic transition, civil society, and immigrant civic engagement, with a regional focus on East Asian politics, especially North Korea.

Fellowship Project:  "Understanding the Structural Determinants of Immigrant Organizations' Policy Influence: The Case Study of North Korean Defector (NKD) - led Organizations in South Korea"

My dissertation aims to study the structural factors that determine the influence of immigrant organizations in the host country’s public policy process. Immigrant organizations bridge the individual experiences of migration and integration and the social and political structure of the host country. Considering their contribution to promoting inclusiveness in societal institutions, it is imperative to understand how the host country responds to and interacts with immigrants’ collective actions. Using the case study of North Korean defector (NKD)-led organizations that provide resettlement support services to NKDs in South Korea, this study explores how immigrants organize and insert themselves into the host society’s public sphere and how social and political dynamics and institutions affect the effectiveness of their claim-making.