Reppy Institute Fellows 2022-23

Our Reppy Fellows are master's, doctoral, and law students at Cornell who receive unique opportunities for professional networking and development in the field of peace and conflict studies. Meet the 2022–23 cohort. 

Addison Barton  

Addison Barton is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Government. His research focuses on international and transnational mechanisms of norm diffusion in civil conflict. Many armed non-state actors make costly commitments to respect international humanitarian law in times of conflict. Addison is interested in using various micro-processes of socialization to explain this curious phenomenon. 

Aishwarya Shankar

Aishwarya Shankar is pursuing a master’s degree in landscape architecture. She is exploring cultural landscapes and the climate change conflict zones of ancient sites of petroglyphs in Maharashtra, India. As a Reppy fellow, she is interested in weaving into her current design ethos questions of advocacy, stewardship, and environmental social justice. 

Aleksandar Vladicic

Aleksandar Vladicic is a PhD student in the Department of Government. His research interests include international and comparative political economy with a focus on the politics of migration, international labor law, group identity, globalization and development, and economic coercion. His projects examine how economic interdependence shapes the migration policy in different political regimes, the connections between domestic politics and migration policy, and the role of labor migrants as political leverage for origin and destination states. 

Angelica Aguirre

Angelica Aguirre is a second-year Ph.D. student in the History Department. She studies the history of paramilitary groups in Mexico through a lens of global and national paramilitarism. Her work focuses on the transition of armed groups known as guardias blancas in the early 20th century, to the use of modern paramilitary forces for counterinsurgency purposes in Mexico.

Avishai Melamed

Avishai Melamed is a graduate student in the Department of Government. His research focuses on international relations, particularly how foreign policy and long-term strategies evolve in response to changing conditions, resources, and new technologies.

Clara Lee

Clara Lee is a second-year master’s student in public administration with a concentration in human rights and social justice with a minor in peace studies. Her interest involves conflict resolution and peace building.

Emily Jackson

Emily Jackson is a Ph.D. student in comparative politics. Her research interests include social movements, reproductive politics, public opinion, and gender in Latin America and the U.S. She is currently developing a project focusing on the legalization of abortion in Argentina and Colombia.

Enoch Aboi

Enoch Aboi is a Ph.D. student in Africana Studies. His research focuses on phenomenology, social identity, and politics of difference to understand how social identity influences the way individuals and groups engage other individuals and groups, and how they choose to act politically.

K. Frances Cayton

Frances Cayton is a second year Ph.D. student in government with a primary concentration in comparative politics and minors in methodology and international relations. Her research focuses on questions related to protest politics and civil society, disinformation, conspiracies and media, and democratization with a regional focus in east and east-central Europe. 

Mariah Thompson

Mariah Thompson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Africana Studies. Her research is at the intersection of legal and extralegal means for the social policing and control of black people in America through what she articulates as whitelashes. 

Musckaan Chauhan 

Musckaan is a PhD student in the Department of Government. Her research explores how postcolonial statecraft is bound up in the parameters of political imagination inscribed by the historical event of decolonization. What does this history reveal about the potential of decolonization as an ongoing process that seeks to do away with the global vestiges of empire?

Roderick Wijunamei

Roderick Wijunamai is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology. His research interests include agrarian change, climate change, customary law, and food systems. Roderick’s Ph.D. project, in particular, seeks to examine the changing livelihood strategies among the upland Konyak Nagas in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands. 

Songtao Duan

Songtao Duan is a master’s student at the Brooks School of Public Policy. His primary field is international development, specializing in politics and economics of development. His research interests include comparative and international political economy of development, foreign aid, state building, authoritarian politics, and democratization. Duan is currently working on his master’s thesis studying the nature and impacts of China’s foreign aid projects from a comparative perspective.

Zinab Zhra Attai

Director's Fellow

Zinab Attai is the 2022-23 Reppy Institute Director’s Fellow and PhD student in the department of Government. Her research interests include state building, governance, and gender in conflict-affected states. Her recent work investigates local-level governance outcomes and institution building under the Taliban and former government in Afghanistan. Prior to starting her PhD, Zinab worked as an international survey researcher, managing research projects in a variety of countries including Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa.