Sean Cronan is a PhD student in the History Department studying the diplomatic and political history of East Asia and Southeast Asia between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. His research examines the impact of the Mongol conquests on how political actors from China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Burma, and beyond understood the interstate order of the day. His project will highlight the emergence of new diplomatic norms in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as how these norms came to be challenged and re-negotiated in the wake of the collapse of the Mongol Empire in East...
EvanFernández is a Ph.D. candidate interested in the transnational history of Latin America, particularly Chile and Peru, as part of the Pacific world. His dissertation explores the Chilean sodium nitrate (salitre) industry and the sale of nitrates to Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chilean-Japanese commerce in nitrates fostered a multifaceted and significant trans-Pacific relationship between businessmen and diplomats in these two states. Evan also works on US-Latin American relations in the twentieth century.
Under British colonial rule (1886-1948), many Burmese students chose to go abroad for schooling due to a lack of educational resources at home. As Burma was then a province of the British Indian Empire, they often traveled to India, where they made connections beyond their homeland and questioned what it might mean to be “Burmese” within the British Empire. In my research, I explore how some Burmese students’ dissatisfaction with Indian education led them to articulate a new ideal of Western-style “national education” for Burma. In the process, colonized students strategically...
Alyssa is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is broadly interested in gender, representation, the political economy of development, and political inequality, with a regional focus on India. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Alyssa conducted research as a Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellow at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, India, and as a Lombard Fellow directing the implementation of a large-scale survey in rural Maharashtra. Through CLEA and McGorrian Fellowships...
My research centers Southeast Asian abolitionist organizing as a site to theorize a framework of healing from refugee trauma. As Southeast Asian refugees in the United States are continually displaced by war, incarceration, and deportation, I ask: how might refugee trauma illuminate the relationships between U.S. empire and the U.S. carceral state? What embodied, epistemological practices do activists use to challenge the state structures responsible for displacement? To examine these questions, I will conduct a multi-sited ethnography of the...
David’s current research explores the development of the Belarusian literary language and particularly its orthography and lexical inventory through the history of the three earliest translations of the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz’s 1834 epic Pan Tadeusz into Belarusian. The project reconsiders the history of modern Belarusian literature as an outgrowth of Polish Romanticism and the Russian imperial ethnographic tradition, and seeks to make a broader argument for understanding the cultural history of Belarus-Lithuania in the 19th and early 20th centuries, beyond...
Kevin is a Ph.D. student in the Romance Languages and Literatures program at UC Berkeley. Through his current research, Kevin plans to apply historical sociolinguistic models to a period in Italian history where it’s never before been done–namely, Italy’s colonial period (1885-1941) in East Africa. Using Italian, Ethiopian, and Eritrean materials (such as court transcripts, letters, and materials used to teach the Italian language overseas) that are currently dispersed throughout libraries and archives in Rome, Kevin...
Julia Raven is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley in political science specializing in military effectiveness and security sector adaptation. Her dissertation project looks at the ethnic exclusion in and effectiveness of contemporary militaries and explores their origins in the strategic variation of ethnic exclusion in colonial militaries. Her project, entitled “Constrained Militaries: The durability of colonial military institutions” consists of two distinct parts. First, she is building an original, cross-national dataset of colonial military structures through archival research in...
What explains the variation in gender inequality exhibited across countries that experienced a communist revolution? Political science scholars have said little about the reasons why some groups are favored over others--or about the durability of inclusionary projects and reforms--in revolutionary movements. My research explores why and when women are included or excluded from communist revolutionary projects by studying Cuban leaders' decision-making process around women's property and political rights.
"The Taíno people met Christopher Columbus and his fleet upon initial arrival to the Caribbean Islands in 1492; and, soon after contact, the Taíno endured slavery and genocide at the hand of the Spanish. As a result of Spanish brutalization, the Taíno population declined, and at a certain point it became beneficial to European colonizers to deny any Indigenous survival in the Islands as a means to bolster the terra nullius justification of conquest. The denial of Indigenous survival in European accounts became the basis for the extinction narrative that has persisted...
