Graduate Fellows
Former Graduate Fellows
Dr. Ryan Edwards received his BA in Geography from UC Berkeley and is completing his PhD in History at Cornell. His work combines historical geography, political ecology, and science and technology studies. Dr. Ryan Edwards is currently an Assistant Professor, Department of Liberal Arts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) & was previously a Visiting Associate Research Scholar 2018/19, Program in Latin American Studies, Princeton University.He spent eighteen months in Argentina conducting fieldwork for his dissertation, which reconstructs an environmental history of the Ushuaia Penal Colony in southernmost Patagonia.
Vincent Mauro is a PhD student in the Government Department. He is interested in how party system development and institutionalization shapes redistribution in Latin America. He has ongoing research projects related to political parties and party systems, social policy, and economic inequality.
David De Micheli, PhD in Government, is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. Previously, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University. His research interests lie in comparative politics, specifically on identity, inequality, and citizenship, with a regional focus on Latin America. His substantive interests include ethnic and identity politics, social movements, and the political economy of development. His research considers the formation of political identities around race and class in Brazil, aiming to understand how social identities become political, and why this is more likely in some parts of Brazil than in others. He was awarded the 2020 Best Dissertation Prize from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science of Association.
Carlos Antonio Mesa-Guerra is a Ph.D. student in Regional Science. He is interested in understanding the existing gaps between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries. His research studies the provision of public goods and services, how spatial and income inequalities affect regional and national growth, the institutional constraints that facilitate or hinder regional development, as well as the economic impacts of immigration on destination countries. LASP Graduate Fellow '19-'20
Jaime Ortiz-Pachar is a PhD student in the department of Natural Resources. His research takes a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of invasive species in the Galapagos Islands. Through a political ecology perspective his project aims to understand the effects of the invasive species discourse in the environmental governance of the Galapagos, in one hand; and in the other hand, to explore the relationship between invasive earthworms and invasive plants. Prior to coming to Cornell, Jaime worked for the Charles Darwin Foundation, an international NGO in the Galapagos. His work was related to the integration of scientific research into public policy. He holds a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Environmental Management, and Environmental Monitoring and Modelling, both from King’s College London.
Karla Peña is a doctoral student in Development Sociology at Cornell University. Her research is in Ecuador where she studies indigenous-peasant movements and their struggle for land rights. Broadly, she is interested in food sovereignty, agrarian change and state-society relations in Latin America. She earned her B.A. in Liberal Studies from California State University Northridge (2009) and her M.S. in Natural Resources and Environment from the University of Michigan (2013).
Josh Savala is a PhD graduate from the History Department. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Rollins College in Florida specializing in: Modern Latin America, Peru, Chile, labor and working-class history, oceans in history, and social movements. His dissertation project looked at the relationships of solidarity and cooperation forged by and between Peruvians and Chileans in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His research delves into the history of medicine, labor and working class history, anarchism, gender, and the maritime world.
Darin Self is a doctoral candidate in the Government Department. His research focuses on how antecedent characteristics of authoritarian rule affects political and electoral institutions in democracies, causes of institutional change, and institutional determinates of populism. He is also interested in how we make causal inferences in politically developing states and designing new ways to measure social structure. His dissertation research is cross-regtional and on: "Binding Contestation: How Party-Military Relations Influenced Democratization in Indonesia and Paraguay."
Maria Jimena Vladez is a former Graduate Fellow and a student in the Government Department, majoring in Comparative Politics. She is interested in the social and electoral consequences of the economic crises, both in Latin America in the 80s and 90s and in contemporary Europe. Jimena is also a graduate student member of the LASP Advisory Committee '19-'20.