Recent Awardees

Graduate Fellowship Recipients

Joseph Akinniyi

2026-27 Jesse F. and Dora H. Bluestone Peace Studies Fellowship

About Joseph

Omobolanle J. Akinniyi is a historian of 20th century Africa, thematically interested in Socio-military History and Gender History. Specifically, he is concerned about the survival strategies of African women in war, their contributions to the war efforts, and the varied manifestations of their contributions in social roles. He is also interested in war memory, trauma, and commemoration.

Outside academics, he co-directs Woke Foundation, an NGO committed to intellectually empowering underserved young Africans and fostering educational development in Africa.

Madeleine Lemos

2026-27 Marion and Frank Long Fellowship

About Madeleine

I am a PhD Candidate in the History department focused on Modern Europe and Spain in the 20th century. My dissertation, Those Spanish Devils: Curating Modernity, Fascism, and Liberalism in Twentieth-Century Spain, examines how Francoist Spain used culture, intellectual life, tourism, and heritage to reshape its international image after World War II. Moving beyond narratives of Spain as either a fascist holdout or a straightforward democratizing state, I explore how the regime adapted fascist political and cultural forms to a changing postwar world. I am especially interested in the relationship between culture, diplomacy, memory, and authoritarianism in modern Europe and our contemporary age.

Freeman Prize and Fellowship in Peace Studies

Ariela Asllani

2026 Harrop and Ruth Freeman Prize in Peace Studies

The Freeman Prize is awarded annually in the spring to a Cornell graduating senior and/or a graduating Master's student. The Freemans established the prize to offer recognition and encouragement to Cornell students actively engaged in promoting peace and to encourage continued work or education in the field of peace studies. 

About Ariela

Ariela is a public policy major whose academic work focuses on international migration, border security, and transnational crime. Growing up in Albania in the aftermath of the Kosovo War, she came to understand the world through a village that sheltered refugees fleeing across the border. Her research interests center on how state violence operates through deterrence-based border regimes and shapes migrants' experiences, with a particular focus on the recruitment and involvement of children in migrant smuggling networks. She has held internships at the Biden-Harris White House, the U.S. Senate, and within the federal government's intelligence sector. Ariela brings extensive international experience to her work, including documentary photography with NGOs in Ukraine, peace work in Israel and Palestine, agricultural development in China, education initiatives in Nepal and Ecuador, and volunteering at the U.S.–Mexico border. After graduation, she will pursue a master's degree at the University of Oxford as a Keasbey Memorial Scholar before returning to work for the U.S. federal government. She believes durable peace requires both accountability for those who profit from instability and real pathways forward for the vulnerable populations caught within it.

Mira DeGregory

2026 Harrop and Ruth Freeman Prize in Peace Studies

The Freeman Prize is awarded annually in the spring to a Cornell graduating senior and/or a graduating Master's student. The Freemans established the prize to offer recognition and encouragement to Cornell students actively engaged in promoting peace and to encourage continued work or education in the field of peace studies. 

About Mira

Mira DeGregory was a Global Development major with a concentration in Environmental Development and a minor in Law and Society. Growing up in upstate New York next to an industrial park—navigating chronic illness from environmental exposure alongside supporting relatives who cycled through incarceration and addiction—she came to understand bodily precarity and institutional failure through the same lens. Those experiences rooted her in the belief that peace is found when institutional, emotional, and relational conditions allow people to live with dignity, heal from structural trauma, and remain in community—and drew her toward repairing the systems that most consistently fail the people they are meant to serve.

Her honors thesis—on sustaining immigrant service providers in an era of mass deportation—led to a book, a best-practices guide, and eight original paintings, delivered to eight organizations at a healing, art-exhibiting convening she organized. She produced and performed at the Voices of Resilience concert with the Ukrainian Classical Voice Project, weaving operatic voice, mariachi music, testimony, and poetry across global conflicts as a live argument for solidarity. She assisted LGBTQ+ refugees in obtaining immigration protections at Refugee Advice and Casework Service in Sydney, Australia, and worked with the New Mexico Environmental Law Center on deliberative democracy frameworks, holding data center projects accountable to rural, Indigenous, and U.S.-Mexico border communities.

The Freeman Prize will support her while she incubates her next project: an online platform that uses arts-based oral histories on climate mobility as a framework for embedding healing practice into institutional support systems. She intends to pursue a JD to work toward institutional frameworks that center healing and self-determination for communities displaced by climate and conflict.

Lucia Thiessen-Rodriguez

2026 Harrop and Ruth Freeman Fellowship in Peace Studies

The Freeman Fellowship is awarded annually to one or more Cornell students to pursue unpaid projects in the field of peace and conflict studies, including unpaid internships, training seminars, and conferences.

About Lucia

Lucia Thiessen-Rodriguez is a Government major pursuing minors in European Studies, Law and Society, and Spanish. She is conducting research at the Universidad Pública de Navarra in Pamplona, Spain regarding political extremism and radicalization. She is also involved in Cornell International Affairs Society where she chairs at conferences. In the future she hopes to go into law, having previously interned with New York State Courts.