Fellows 2017-2018

The Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG), directed by Helen V. Milner, is pleased to announce the selection of its 2017-2018 fellows for the Center’s fellowship programs: Globalization and Governance Fellowship Program, Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Regional Political Economy, and the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Program.

The 13th cohort of NCGG fellows chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the globe will be in residence in September 2017 through June 2018, pursuing their own research projects and contributing to the intellectual life of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the School of Public and International Affairs.

NCGG Postdoctoral Fellows

Eric B. Arias is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. Eric’s research interests lie in international and comparative political economy, focusing on the international sources of domestic politics and political economy of development (with a regional specialization in Latin America). He combines experimental and observational methods at different levels of analysis to explore two lines of inquiry: (1) how international flows of capital affect development and political accountability, and (2) the role of information in those and other dynamics.

Volha Charnysh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Her research interests include historical political economy, ethnic politics, and comparative political behavior. Volha’s dissertation investigates the persistent effects of major historical episodes of violence on contemporary electoral outcomes and economic behavior. She argues that past conflict may influence long-run outcomes by transforming local-level institutional structures, which are reproduced over time and continue to shape economic incentives, and by transforming attitudes, which are transmitted across generations and can moderate the persuasiveness of contemporary policy framing. Her work combines archival research with cutting-edge statistical methods and has been published in Comparative Political Studies and in the European Journal of International Relations. 

Raphael Cunha is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at The Ohio State University and currently holds a dissertation fellowship from Brazil's CAPES Foundation/Ministry of Education. Raphael’s interests cover international and comparative political economy, with a focus on the politics of financial globalization and sovereign credit risk. His research examines how and why global capital mobility conditions national political and economic events by investigating multiple forms of contagion in the global political economy. Raphael analyzes contagion dynamics from domestic to international investors in global capital market reactions to politics, diffusion processes in governments' decisions to default on sovereign debt, as well as contagion in market assessments of sovereign credit risk induced by investors' use of decision heuristics.

Noam Gidron is a research associate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Noam received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in May 2016. Noam’s research focuses on political economy and electoral politics in advanced democracies. It draws on multiple methods, including survey analysis, experiments, text analysis, and elite interviews. Geographically, Noam’s work covers member states of the European Union, the United States and Israel. Noam’s dissertation research examines the variety of right-wing ideologies in Western Europe and their implications for the strategic dilemmas of center-right parties.

Sigrun Kahl is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Sigrun studies how long-term comparative historical factors such as religion shape current policies and institutions for addressing, among other things, poverty, unemployment, education, and abortion. Among courses Sigrun teaches are Welfare States Across NationsReligion and Politics, and Historical and Archival Methods. Sigrun is co-director of the MacMillan Center Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Society and co-runs the Yale Political Science Department’s Comparative Politics Workshop.

Ranjit Lall is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Ranjit’s research interests are in the areas of international relations and international political economy, with a focus on international institutions, global governance, financial regulation, and quantitative methodology. Ranjit graduated from the University of Oxford (Merton College) with a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), winning the Gibbs Prize for best undergraduate thesis in politics. Before coming to Harvard, Ranjit worked as an economist at the Bank of England and an editorial writer at the Financial Times. His research has been published in International OrganizationPolitical Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, Regulation & Governance, and the Review of International Political Economy.

Nicole Weygandt is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cornell University’s Department of Government. Nicole’s research centers on legal regimes and their role in the international political economy. In particular, Nicole studies the mechanisms by which diffusion and legal transplantation occur in different contexts. She emphasizes the role of developing countries as sources of legal innovation and promoters of diffusion. One area in which this is particularly pronounced is in oil and gas law. Nicole’s dissertation explores the case of petroleum regimes, which determine the allocation of ownership and risk between host countries and investors.

RPE Postdoctoral Fellows

Alexei Abrahams researches conflict in the Middle East from a mixed perspective of economics and political science. His work applies economic and game theory, econometric techniques, machine learning, natural language parsing, satellite imagery and internet data to analyze conflict between state and non-state actors and the economic consequences of their actions. While his past work has focused on violence in the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Alexei's ongoing projects address non-violent tactics, including cyber/informational attacks, and are relevant to the broader MENA region, including the Gulf. Alexei holds a PhD in Economics from Brown University and is an affiliate of Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC). He was previously a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative of Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center and the University of California at San Diego's Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation

Renard Sexton is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics at New York University. Renard studies local level conflict across the developing world. Before graduate school, Renard worked for the United Nations and NGOs in Switzerland, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Ecuador, as well as contributing to journalistic outlets. Renard researches how local actors respond strategically to outside intervention, such as development projects, extractive industries projects, aid infusions, or peacekeepers. Renard’s work shows how political institutions moderate the effects of such interventions on conflict.

Joint Fellowship: Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and Department of Politics:

Marina Duque is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the Managing Editor of Security Studies. Starting in September 2017, Marina will be a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University's Department of Politics and the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, and an Assistant Professor at Florida State University’s Department of Political Science (on leave 2017-2018). Before joining the Belfer Center, Marina completed a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Ohio State University (2016) and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Brasília (2008). Marina previously worked as a career diplomat in the Ministry of External Relations of Brazil and an assistant at the Ministry of Defense of Brazil.

Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship Program

Building on a partnership established in 2001, Oxford University and Princeton University launched a postdoctoral fellowship initiative, the Global Leaders Fellowship Program, created to enhance the capacity of developing countries in the areas of scholarship and policy.

Beginning in September 2008, up to six fellowships are awarded annually to promising, early-career scholars from developing countries, which will allow fellows to spend one year at Oxford and one year at Princeton pursuing post-doctoral research, with funding provided by the program to cover fellows' full living costs. At Oxford they will be based at the Global Economic Governance Programme and the Centre for International Studies within the Department of Politics and International Relations. At Princeton fellows will be based in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Global Leaders Fellowship (GLF) scholars in Princeton for 2017-18 are:

Zheng Chen is an Assistant Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a second year Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellow. His current research centers on China and other rising powers’ efforts in reforming regional orders and global economic governance. His book, Rising Power and the Construction of International Human Rights Norms (Shanghai Renmin Publishing House, 2017, in Chinese), examines the status incentive and rhetoric strategies of rising powers in promotion of international human rights norms developments. His work has been published in International Studies ReviewChinese Journal of International Politics and Journal of Contemporary China. Chen earned his PhDs from the Double Doctoral Degree Program between Peking University (China) and Waseda University (Japan).

Natalya Naqvi’s research interests are in the areas of international political economy and comparative political economy of development, with a focus on the role of the state and the financial sector in economic development, as well as the amount of policy space developing countries have to conduct selective industrial policy. Her current project investigates the political economy factors behind why despite external constraints due to financial globalization, some countries manage to exert public control over their financial sectors in order to support industrial policy. She holds a PhD from the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge.