The Department of Anthropology extends its congratulations to our graduate students on their recent honors and awards:

Ipsita Dey *24 has received an Assistant Professorship at the University of Washington. Her dissertation explores how Indo-Fijians operationalize narratives of plantation labor and contemporary farmwork to produce a non-settler local identity that reconfigures relations between diaspora, indigeneity, and nationalism.

Hazal Hürman received the Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship from Princeton’s Graduate School. Hazal’s dissertation foregrounds children’s experiences to understand ethno-racial sensibilities and political anxieties as they are reconfigured under Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian regime.

JahAsia Jacobs received a Wenner-Gren Foundation Research Grant for her fieldwork in Georgia, USA. Her dissertation lies at the nexus of plantation worlds and peasant studies in anthropology, exploring the property and labor relations of Black farmers working on family land and seeking U.S. Department of Agriculture farm loans to develop their operations.

Kamal Kariem has received a Postdoctoral Fellowship with William College’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology. His dissertation, “Believing Conservation: Altering Land Relations, Hunting, and Indigeneity on the Bikin River,” investigates a conflict around nature conservation and the Bikin National Park in Krasnyi Yar, a small taiga village in Primorskii krai within the Russian Federation.

Navjit Kaur received a Dissertation Writing Grant with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Her dissertation project foregrounds the gendered Muslim subject to ask: how do Muslim women inhabit, contest, and navigate these uncertain futures of financial empowerment and national belonging where existential and economic futures intertwine?

Moad Musbahi received a Graduate Fellowship with the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. Musbahi works on ‘continuity’ and how it can be claimed and constituted across the region of North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on the performative moment of articulation and its acoustic dimension, he is interested in investigating the different methodologies employed to demand economic privilege and political participation contrary to the nation-state.

Yanping Ni has been awarded the Huo Family Fellowship from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. This fellowship is awarded to qualified Princeton Ph.D. students who are conducting field work outside the United States, especially in or related to China.

Nikhil Pandhi has received a three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. Pandhi is currently finishing his doctoral dissertation “Dying of Casteism,” which puts ethnography, Hindi Dalit literature, and anti-colonial caste studies in dialogue with Black and race studies to investigate the affective, embodied and aesthetic lives of caste violence in India.

Michelle Rodriguez received a Wenner-Gren Foundation Research Grant for her fieldwork in Oakland, California. Rodriguez's study will ethnographically explore the de-medicalized practices of a collective of Black midwives known as The Art of Mothering.

Sohail Jagat *23 received a four-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. His dissertation is based on three years of ethnographic field research Sohail conducted between 2017 and 2022 with groups of asylum seekers that arrived in Berlin in 2015. It traces the complex and contradictory afterlives of German Willkommenskultur (Welcome Culture), examining the way it became a certain turning point for German society, Berlin, and Sohail's interlocutors.

Alexandra Sastrawati received a Dissertation Writing Grant with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Her doctoral research spotlights global mental health, comparative urban marginality and, on a granular level, queer artists’, migrants’, and laypeople’s recognizable and ephemeral forms of artmaking and care. In addition to ethnography and quantitative social science methods, she works with archives and visual materials spanning the Netherlands, Britain, Japan, and Singapore.

Alisa Sopova received a Wenner-Gren Foundation Research Grant for her fieldwork in Kyiv, Ukraine. During this year-long fieldwork based in the Ukrainian capital, she will study everyday life under the constraints of war and the role that material objects and environments play in it.

Aaron Su received the Dean’s Completion Fellowship, which will be followed by an appointment as a Postgraduate Research Associate with the Graduate School. Through 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan, Su’s dissertation examines how Amis Indigenous communities insist that systemic issues like economic inequalities, lack of health resources, and severed land relations well exceed the scope of inclusive design practices.

Junbin Tan received the Dean’s Completion Fellowship, which will be followed by an appointment as a Postgraduate Research Associate with the Graduate School. Through ethnographic research on Kinmen from 2020 to 2023, Tan examines the ways by which calendric temple festivals, domestic rituals, and the documentation of these traditions are practices through which one generation of Kinmenese—born in the 1960s and 1970s—articulate their visions for Kinmen and the Taiwan Strait.

Ayluonne Tereszkiewicz received a Wenner-Gren Foundation Research Grant for her fieldwork in North Carolina. Her research concerns the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its remediations of historically Black towns along North Carolina's sea coast. Through investigating localized understandings—and iterations—of harm and repair, Ayluonne will interrogate conceptual, material, and embodied relationships between the EPA's remediation procedures (i.e., Superfund and Brownfield cleanups) and local practices for historical restoration and heritage-keeping.

Christopher Zraunig was awarded the Laurence S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellowship with the University Center for Human Values. This award recognizes post-generals graduate students enrolled at Princeton University with distinguished academic records and dissertation research centrally involved in the critical study of human values. Zraunig’s dissertation explores the effectiveness and productiveness of diversification efforts in geriatric and gerontic spaces in Berlin, Germany.