Degree Pursued: PhD

Anticipated Degree Year: 2027

Committee Chair/Advisor: Steve Grodsky

Discipline: Natural Resources

Primary Language: Indonesian, Bataknese

Research Countries: New York, Indonesia

Research Interests: Grassland bird communities, Landscape ecology, Quantitative ecology

Malavika Narayan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her research is based in Delhi and focuses on the emergence, evolution and persistence of particular geographies of urban informal work. The project aims to challenge the framing of labor's marginality under contemporary urban development models by centering the spatial practices of informal workers in the production and maintenance of the city.

Matt Finck is a historian of Modern Europe with a focus on intellectual and cultural history. His research explores the political culture of revolutionary socialism. His dissertation examines the influence astronomy and other reflections on celestial bodies had on the political imaginaries of socialist, anarchist, and communist thinkers and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His other research interests include democratic and political theory, utopian imaginaries, visual and material culture, and critical theory.

Chris Mingo is a PhD student in the History Department specializing in modern and contemporary European history. He is broadly interested in the histories of fascism, nationalism, and European imperialism, as well as political economy, and literary studies. His dissertation research examines Fascist Italy's parallel projects of imperial expansion and the development of a corporatist economy in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Degree Pursued: PhD

Anticipated Degree Year: -

Committee Chair/Advisor: Nick Salvato

Discipline: Hip-Hop Studies, Sound Studies, Vietnamese Diasporic Studies, Performing Studies

Primary Language: Vietnamese, Thai, German, English

Degree Pursued: PhD

Anticipated Degree Year: 2025

Committee Chair/Advisor: Renata Leitao

Discipline: Apparel Design

Primary Language: Mandarin, English

Degree Pursued: PhD

Anticipated Degree Year: 2027

Discipline: Economics

Primary Language: Vietnamese, English

Research Interest: My research area is public policy and development economics. My past works include (1) productivity improvement from land consolidation program in Viet Nam, and (2) comparison of Covid policies in Asia. My future plan involves universal basic incomes in the Southeast Asia area.

Degree Pursued: PhD

Anticipated Degree Year: 2030

Committee Chair/Advisor: Derek Chang

Discipline: (Asian) American History

Primary Language: Vietnamese

Research Interest: Saomai is interested in US empire and militarism, Third World struggles and imaginations, and intergenerational refugee repertoires of storytelling as competing but interconnected projects of knowledge production.

Xintong Chen studies the auditory cultures of migration across the South China Sea from the 17th to 20th centuries. Her research uncovers how sound and listening practices created shared “cultural commons” among diverse groups of migrants and sojourners, offering a new perspective on migration as a lived and cultural process beyond political or economic frameworks.

Degree Pursued: PhD

Anticipated Degree Year: 2029

Committee Chair/Advisor: Eric Tagliacozzo

Discipline: Southeast Asian History

Priyanka Sen is a Ph.D. candidate in the HAUD program. Her research investigates architectural entanglements with spatial geographies, migration and environmental histories, focusing on the South Asian diaspora and its intertwinement with settlement, citizenship, and the transnational immigrant experience.