The Department of Anthropology is thrilled to welcome our exciting and talented fall 2025 incoming graduate student cohort. Please read below a bit about each student’s interests and goals for their time here at Princeton.

Mariana Amaral holds a Master's degree in Sociology from the University of São Paulo (USP), where she also earned her Law degree. Her research explores the relationship between state, care, and control, with a focus on drug policy, mental health, and the criminal justice system, as well as contemporary forms of authoritarianism and neoliberal governance. In her dissertation, she plans to examine how logics of punishment and care converge and materialize in the lives of marginalized Black and poor populations, by investigating Brazil’s shifting approaches to drug use - marked by the recent expansion of therapeutic communities and other private rehabilitation clinics - and their connections with institutions and practices of the criminal justice system. Prior to coming to Princeton, she has worked as a researcher in non-profits focused on the Brazilian criminal justice system and the contemporary threats to democracy in Brazil.

Kefeshe Bernard (BA., Cantab) is interested in understanding food as a site and source of ontological resistance in the Caribbean. They plan to explore how the changing economic and political landscape and pressure of the climate crisis impact food production, eating and edible storytelling and self-making in the Caribbean, particularly Trinidad and Tobago. Kefeshe uses food as a method of communicating and learning about Caribbean history and is interested in learning how relationships to domestic farming and increased dependency on agricultural imports impact eating practices, traditional healthcare and risk of diet-related non-communicable diseases. Their previous work includes research on the necropolitical complexities of Sargassum seaweed pollution in the Caribbean; working with Cambridge county council to improve free school meal access to primary school children; and most recently as director of the End Everyday Racism sports campaign. Kefeshe's work is unapologetically anti-racist, anti-colonial and centers stories of resistance, decolonial joy and self-definition over narratives of oppression. 

Signe Düring (MPhil Oxford University; B.A. Aarhus University) has a background in history and medical anthropology. Her academic journey has spanned diverse empirical fields —from the history of Danish psychiatry to Niger Delta eco-militias—but has been unified by a consistent theoretical thread: a transdisciplinary focus on resistance and class, which will likewise serve as the twin theoretical foci of her doctoral work. This pursuit has thus far taken her through various spaces of resistance: from exploring the history of working-class populations in Danish asylums, to researching educational access for displaced peoples in the Georgia-Abkhazia borderlands, conducting fieldwork in children's psychiatric hospitals, and most recently collaborating with Nigerian scholar-activists fighting environmental injustice in the Niger Delta. She plans to continue a multidisciplinary approach to climate justice under fossil capitalism in her doctoral research.

Echo Lyu (BA., University of Chicago) grew up in Shijiazhuang, China. Being an avid traveler, it was quite intuitive for Lyu to look into anthropology. Yet what convinced Lyu was, like David Graeber put it, that it opens up windows to diverse possibilities of collective life. Lyu proposed to study "death cafés" (where quite healthy people discuss imaginations of good death). The more enduring interest here is, what are some forms of resistance, especially through a redefinition of well-being and collective well-being, emerge in this neoliberal and intensively policed world. Lyu also thinks about and play with food and traditional music.

Zubaida Qaissi (NYU M.A., University of Pennsylvania B.A.) intends to study the existential, psychic, and sociopolitical dimensions of diasporic return to postwar Iraq. She is interested in the multifarious and multidirectional migrations which Iraqis have undertaken since the invasion of 2003. As those displaced by the war make their returns to Iraq and begin to imagine their futures in the place they once escaped, Qaissi aims to research the socialities, political formations, strategies, and narratives of diasporic returnees. As this project seeks to observe an inherently multifaceted experience, Qaissi hopes to conduct this ethnography in multiple sites—abroad and in Iraq, 'offline' and online—and utilize a variety of methods from traditional fieldwork to ethnographic film, drawing on her professional experience working in documentary filmmaking. 

Anna Tyshkov (Columbia University, MA; McGill University, BA) is interested in the connections and relationships between Palestinian/Arab and Russian/Soviet worlds, particularly how these worlds converge through the history of ethnography in Palestine. She plans to start by looking at the transnational stories of Palestinians who attended Russian missionary schools built in Greater Syria, and specifically those who later conducted ethnographic research in Palestine before 1948. Tracing the different ways in which ethnography has portrayed Palestine over time, she is interested in the new histories and narratives that may open up about Anthropology, from the Palestinian perspective. This project builds and departs from her previous work on oral history with Palestinian refugee communities in the West Bank.