Vinicius Cardoso Reis and Nicolás Díaz Letelier, third-year graduate students in Anthropology, have been awarded Wenner-Gren Foundation research grants for their 2025-26 academic year dissertation research. 

Vinicius’ dissertation project is titled “Pandemic Continuities: Autocratic Neglect and Reparative Practices in Brazil.” His research explores disputes arising from the activism of Covid-19 victims, especially as they seek accountability and reparation for government neglect at the height of the pandemic. Vinicius will conduct fieldwork with activists as they interact with state agents, practitioners, and other key actors across the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Manaus, Porto Alegre, and Brasília. With this, he seeks to understand how reparative practices are shaped by experiences of state violence and histories of redress, thus informing victim-led political action. His research sheds light on the ongoing impact of Covid-19 on social life and health mobilization against the backdrop of a struggling democracy. Simultaneously, it contributes to a global debate about the Covid-19 pandemic, the state’s role, and the catastrophic consequences of neglect. Ultimately, Vinicius is concerned with how authoritarianism produced biological and sociopolitical continuities of the pandemic, leading victims to seek forms of healing and reckoning.

Vinicius' dissertation co-advisers are João Biehl and Elizabeth Davis.

Nicolás' dissertation project is titled “The Most Secret Memory of Men: On Time, Violence, and the Aging of Dictatorial Perpetrators.” Nicolás’ research examines the aging and afterlives of former dictatorial perpetrators: intelligence agents, military officers, and civilian collaborators from the institutions that composed Chile’s repressive apparatus during the dictatorship (1973–1990). Drawing on dreams, archival records, literary and photographic creations, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, his work interrogates the worlds of secrecy, complicity, and impunity that persist beyond the fall of authoritarian rule —in Chile, South America, and beyond. By engaging with the intimate ethical and psychic dimensions of former agents’ lives, Nicolás problematize how these actors navigate the dissolution of a dictatorship: from their time in the secret police, through the end of the dictatorship and the dissolution of their units, to their fugitive and under-the-radar years, and finally to their presents and fabulated futures. His research situates these individual trajectories within Chile’s compromised democratic transition, revealing how the legacies of state violence, silence, and erasure continue to shape political and affective life regionally and transnationally.

Nicolás' dissertation co-advisers are João Biehl and Laurence Ralph.