Celebrating our Doctoral Students

Wow! The Department of Anthropology is extremely proud of its doctoral students, whose achievements this year were exceptional in every domain. A record number of our young colleagues completed and defended their dissertations. Many received prestigious fellowships to undertake field research or for write-up. Several received significant prizes and honors. And recent graduates obtained some of the discipline's most coveted postdoctoral fellowships and new positions. We celebrate them all, and look forward to further successes in the future. Here's a little run-down of this past semester's marvelous accomplishments.

CELEBRATING THE RECEIPT OF THEIR DOCTORAL DEGREES
  • Chloé Faux
  • Alexandria Hansen
  • Amer Ibrahim
  • Benjamin Liberatore
  • Stephanie Ratte
DOCTORAL CANDIDATES WHO DEFENDED DISSERTATIONS
  • Fern Grear
  • Emily Hoffman
  • Jenny Ni
  • Akshay Ragupathy
  • Chazelle Rhoden
 
STUDENTS WHO RECEIVED DISSERTATION RESEARCH AND WRITE-UP FELLOWSHIPS
  • Amani Agbaria, Department of Anthropology Dissertation Fellowship
  • Carlos Arroyo Batista, Department of Anthropology Dissertation Fellowship and IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship
  • Wilmer Isaac Falcon, Wenner Gren Foundation award for dissertation research
  • Oliver Friedmann, American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies Language Grant; GSAS Summer Language Fellowship; ISERP Graduate Student Research Grant; Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund PhD Summer Grant
  • Xingyan Guo, Weatherhead East Asian Institute Fellows program
  • Hala Habib, Lindt Dissertation Fellowship
  • Nikita Karbasov, GSAS travel award for dissertation research
  • Anselm Kizza-Besigye, ISERP summer travel grant
  • Zarino Lanni, Migrantes Fellowship for doctoral research (declined); Department of Anthropology Dissertation Fellowship
  • Asprey Liu, GSAS International Travel Award, Fellowship, Columbia University
  • Alex McDougle, Wenner Gren Foundation award for dissertation research
  • Sean Muller, Mellon Innovation Award for dissertation research
  • Tabitha Payne, ISERP grant for summer research
  • Milan Taylor, ISERP Graduate Student Research Grant
  • Elena Vanasse Torres, ISERP dissertation grant
  • Phoebe Whiteside, Wenner Gren Foundation award for dissertation research

 

SPECIAL AWARDS AND HONORS
  • Amanda Althoff, GSAS Teaching Scholar’s Award for 2026-27
  • Julie Flandreau, NYSCA/Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) for Artists 2026 Awardee
  • Zarino Lanni, accepted another fellowship with the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Senior Teaching Observation Fellowship, building on his participation in the Teaching Observation Fellows program during 2024-25
  • Asprey Liu, Official delegate of the American Anthropological Association to the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil (COP30)
  • Giorgia Mirto, Lead Teaching Fellow 2026-27

 

PUBLICATIONS AND SPECIAL SCHOLARLY ACTIVITY
  • Amanda Althoff (with Miranda LaZar and Isabel Beach), published "It’s XTRATUF: Developing a Resource Network for Graduate Students in Alaskan Archaeology," Alaska Journal of Anthropology, 35-48.
  • Evin Grody, collaborated on two new human-animal exhibits going up in the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History [on Bats, Pangolins].
  • Emily Hoffman, was named a 2026 Junior Scholar, and selected to participate in the Junior Faculty Workshop at UPenn's Carey Law School, with a paper entitled "How Trauma Counts: Traumatic Inheritance, Kinship, and History U.S. Child Welfare Courts."
  • Anselm Kizza-Besigye, published "Mass Wasting," in The WegandaReview: A Journal of Culture, Art & Ideas.
  • Ahmed Zakarya Mitiche,  “Powers of the Soul in Revolutionary Algeria.” Anthropology News, Anthropology of Religion section
  • Saphe Shamoun, organized two conferences, one at the University of Damascus in Syria and one at Princeton University.
  • Jorge Alejandro Rodríguez Solórzano guest-edited the emergent conversation series "Indigenous Politics, State Relations, and Populism in the Americas" for the online edition of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), contributing an introduction. His dissertation chapter on Indigenous constitutional activism in Mexico was selected for the Global Scholars Intensive Workshop at the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy, to take place at L'École de Droit at Sciences Po.