Anthropology graduate students Lucas Prates, Darius Sadighi, and Christopher Zraunig have been awarded Graduate Dissertation Writing Fellowships for the 2025-26 academic year. 

Lucas Prates, G6, has been selected for a one-semester Graduate Dissertation Writing Fellowship with the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) for the fall 2025 term. Lucas’ dissertation research examines the contradictions and potentialities of two opposing phenomena in contemporary Amazonia: the sweeping dominance of industrial agribusiness and the nascent world of market-based conservation initiatives. Focusing on large-scale landowners and farmers, his dissertation probes the settler colonial aspects of these interlocutors, whose origins relate to European settlers who first arrived in Brazil between the 19th and 20th centuries. Lucas’ dissertation reveals not only the political but also the sociocultural challenges of environmental conservation in an Amazonia nearing its tipping point. In doing so, it contributes to the subfields of environmental anthropology, legal and political anthropology, the anthropology of elites, and the anthropology of development. Lucas is co-advised by Professors João Biehl and Carolyn Rouse. 

Darius Sadighi, G5, and Christopher Zraunig, G6, have been selected as Graduate Fellows with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). PIIRS provides dissertation completion fellowships for advanced graduate students whose dissertations are framed in terms of international or regional studies (broadly defined). Students who receive fellowships participate in a community of dissertation writers that is centered on a weekly interdisciplinary seminar.

Darius’ dissertation, “Nature-Based Socialism and the Ecology of Projects in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta,” looks at the ways in which the Vietnamese socialist state is being reconfigured in light of the transnational development complex that has arisen to tackle climate change adaptation in the Mekong Delta. Hi research explores questions of tech innovation, networks of scientific research in the Global South, and multipolarity in the context of the growing US-China rivalry in the region. Darius is co-advised by Professor João Biehl and Assistant Professor Jerry Zee. 

Christopher’s dissertation is tentatively titled “Care and Its Others: Diversity Work, Homonationalism and Good Aging in Germany.” Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, Christopher explores the effectiveness and productiveness of diversification efforts in geriatric and gerontic spaces in Berlin, Germany. They thereby engage with ideas of the good later life, desires for state recognition and refusals thereof, the relation between homonationalism and domestication of queerness, and queer possibilities beyond dominant LGBTIQ+ rights discourse. In doing so, Christopher engages with discussions in queer anthropology/queer theory, empirical ethics and the anthropology of aging and care, as well as the anthropology of institutions. Christopher is co-advised by Professors Laurence Ralph and Carolyn Rouse.