Elena Amaya is a PhD Student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies antisemitism, gendered violence and law with a historical focus on war and genocide.
Brandon is a PhD student in international relations. His research focuses on how states prepare for military threats across both government and society, specifically in the contexts of Taiwan and the broader East Asian security environment. Prior to Berkeley, Brandon worked as an analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense, taught English in Hualien County, Taiwan on a Fulbright grant, and received his bachelor's degree in Government from Harvard College.
Shira E. Cohen is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in International Relations, with a Designated Emphasis in the Study of Religion. She is an affiliated researcher at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and was a Hans J. Morgenthau Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame in 2025–2026. Her research examines international security, military strategy, and the intersection of religion and international relations, with a particular focus on religious signaling, coercion, and strategic...
Sakina is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on how citizen state relationships change with the proliferation of technology in welfare service delivery in South Asia.
She holds a Masters in International Development Policy from Duke University, a Masters in Public Policy & a Bachelors in Economics from University of Mumbai. In the past she has worked as a researcher with LibTech India, an organization focused on improving public service delivery, in collaboration with several...
Leonardo is a PhD candidate in Political Science. His research focuses on International Relations theory, qualitative methods, democracy promotion, and authoritarianism, particularly in Latin America & the Caribbean. Leonardo holds a MSc. in Global Governance & Diplomacy from the University of Oxford and B.A.s in International Relations & Global Studies and Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
Joe Greenbaum is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies comparative political and economic development. He works on questions surrounding resource and waste politics, and the environmental and social effects that attend these.
Johnathan Guy is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on the comparative political economy of energy and climate change. More specifically, he is interested in how decarbonization (or lack thereof) in low-income societies can be understood as a political outcome, one conditioned by the presence of varied institutions and coalitions of interests. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., Guy completed a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He is also on the editorial board of The Trouble Magazine, an online...
Matthew Kovac is PhD student in History at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on the Irish republican movement, decolonization, and the Global Cold War.
Dinah Lawan is a PhD student in Political Science in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies political violence, with a focus on civilian agency in armed conflict, examining insurgent violence, its impacts on communities, and how civilians self-organize to protect themselves in the absence of state protection. Her work focuses specifically on Sub-Saharan Africa, and her dissertation examines northeastern Nigeria, exploring how ordinary civilians have protected themselves and their communities through over a...
Yue Lin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Political Economy.
In the dissertation, Yue studies an extreme version of economic de-globalization: the rising trend of advanced democracies leveraging national security to restrict multinational enterprises from both emerging and established markets. She documents the political origins of this growing trend in U.S. Congress, and the socio-political strategies multinational corporations adopt to mitigate geopolitical risks. Her dissertation received the...
