Current Fellows

Spring 2026

Hernán 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.