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Graduate Students

The Nanovic Institute supports, mentors, accompanies and fosters the professional development of graduate students whose research focuses on topics within European studies.

The Institute provides funding for research and writing, and opportunities to present and discuss work-in-progress. Importantly, Nanovic also provides graduate students with a community in which they can collaborate and support each other's scholarship, and help shape the Institute's intellectual life.

The Institute currently awards dissertation fellowships to support graduate students writing on topics within European studies. The Paul G. Tobin Dissertation Fellowship and the Dominica and Frank Annese Fellowship in Graduate Studies fund graduate students over the course of an academic year as they conduct research and write their dissertations. These awards allow students to devote full attention to their project for an entire academic year.

Nanovic has also developed a new program to bring graduate students in European studies more closely into its life and operation. A complementary cohort to the advanced graduate students who have won dissertation completion fellowships, these graduate fellows are already closely involved in several exciting new initiatives, including the "Europe in the World" project.

Sevda Arslan
Graduate Fellow, 2019-20

Sevda Arslan
Graduate Fellow, 2019-20
Sevda is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology and is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist specializing in mobility and ethnic minority studies. Her dissertation research aims to understand the underlying complexities and variations in self-identification processes of minority migrant groups. By taking a multi-sited approach with the focus on the Zazaki speakers in Germany and Turkey, Sevda examines the daily experiences and the role of language and religious practices in identity formation and negotiation by utilizing ethnographic methods. Sevda holds an M.A. degree in Political Science from Western Michigan University where she also completed a year of graduate course work in the Anthropology Department. In 2013, Sevda received her B.A. degree in European Studies from Maastricht University, in the Netherlands.
Alex Athenson
Graduate Fellow, Spring 2019

Alex Athenson
Graduate Fellow, Spring 2019
Alex is a master's student in architecture. He is particularly interested in researching architecture as a permanent embodiment of political and economic power, especially in areas of diverse cultural amalgamation. He has spent the greater part of the past two years studying the history of Georgian architecture and urban forms both in North America and Great Britain. He holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 2016.
Will Beattie
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23

Will Beattie
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23
Will Beattie is a Medieval Studies PhD candidate in Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. His research on Old English apocalyptic literature explores early medieval cultures of preaching, textual adaptation, and the interplay between religion, politics, and identity. He is a co-editor of Nanovic’s Europe in the World platform, and co-editor of the Medieval Institute’s Meeting in the Middle Ages podcast. Will’s dissertation examines the development of vernacular apocalyptic preaching in early medieval England, focussing on anonymous texts. He is interested in how the generic conventions of homily, and notions of authorship in the period, intersect with Christian apocalyptic traditions.
Mette Evelyn Bjerre
Dissertation Fellow, 2020-21

Mette Evelyn Bjerre
Dissertation Fellow, 2020-21
mbjerre@nd.edu
Mette Evelyn (Eve) Bjerre is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Eve’s research focuses on racialisation processes and multiracial identities in Denmark. Historically, Nordic Europe has been overwhelmingly white but undergone significant demographic changes due to immigration from the European Union (EU), non-European countries, and increasing intermarriage rates during the last four decades. In response to increasing diversity, Denmark now has the most punitive immigration laws in the EU and a decidedly anti-immigration socio-political climate and public discourse. Despite the increase in racial diversity, race is notably absent from the public discourse. In place of a racial vocabulary, politicians and scholars substitute talking about race with ‘colour-blind’ and ‘race- neutral’ language, which result in a public discourse where the corporeality or race goes unrecognised. Taking these factors into account, Eve investigates how an increasing population of Ethnic-Danes with one immigrant parent come to embody a racial identity by way of navigating their mixed identity in a socio-political context where race is not a recognised social category.

Eve was awarded the Frank and Dominica Annese Dissertation Fellowship for the 2020-21 academic year.
Claudia Carroll
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23

Claudia Carroll
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23
Claudia Carroll is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, with a minor in Irish Studies. Her research focuses on the nineteenth-century British and Irish novel through a narrative theory and cognitive science lens. Her multi-disciplinary dissertation, “Why Character Seem Real”, uses approaches from computational text analysis and cognitive psychology to explain why we think about certain literary characters like real people—developing attachments to them, speculating about their behaviour in hypothetical situations, and feeling like we know them like we know our friends and family. Claudia’s other interests include fictional representations of history, cultural memory and narratology.
Shinjini Chattopadhyay
Graduate Fellow, 2019-20

Shinjini Chattopadhyay
Graduate Fellow, 2019-20
A Ph.D. student in the department of English, Shinjini Chattopadhyay intends to explore how the urban texture is constructed in the works of James Joyce. She wishes to conduct a genetic study of the avant-textes of Joyce to understand how Joyce in his texts incorporates multiple urban fabrics within the overarching presence of the Hibernian metropolis.
Dong Hwan (Alex) Chun
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22

Dong Hwan (Alex) Chun
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22
Dong Hwan (Alex) Chun is a Ph.D. candidate in English examining the various ways in which early modern writers attempted to converse with the ancients. In particular, he looks at how literary productions of Renaissance humanists were influenced and shaped by their discourse with classical authors as well as by contemporary cultural interactions. He explores how they collaborated with classical authors to produce dynamic systems of meanings that spoke to early modern worldviews and socio-political conditions.
Francisco Cintrón Mattei
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22

Francisco Cintrón Mattei
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22
Francisco J. Cintrón Mattei is a third-year Ph.D. student in Medieval Studies. His research centers broadly on the legal status and legal culture of religious minorities residing throughout the medieval Mediterranean. A historian by training, his focus begins with the social history of Christians living in Muslim Spain, delves comparatively into the status of European minorities, and extends back into the Christian communities of the wider medieval Islamicate world. He is interested in the lived reality of legal pluralism and the social dynamics that emerge from the convergence of pluralistic legal systems in medieval societies. Additionally, his studies trace the dual development of medieval canon law and Classical Islamic law as they pertain to the history of Christian-Muslim relations.
Joseph Clarkson
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23

Joseph Clarkson
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23
Joseph Clarkson is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in Political Science specializing in Political Theory and International Relations. For his dissertation, Joseph is writing on the sources of political unity in the state theories of Carl Schmitt and Hermann Heller, two important theorists of the Weimar Republic. Joseph’s previous projects focused on the intersection of international relations and the history of political thought, including papers on Hegel’s account of war and Rousseau’s role in the formation of structural realism. Before coming to the University of Notre Dame, Joseph studied Philosophy, Classics, and German through the University Scholars Program at Baylor University, where he received his B.A. in 2019. Joseph is originally from Burnet, Texas.
Jacob Coen
Dissertation Fellow, 2020-21

Jacob Coen
Dissertation Fellow, 2020-21
jcoen@nd.edu
Jacob (Jake) Coen studies violence and political rhetoric. His dissertation research focuses primarily on the concept of tyranny in ninth- and tenth-century France and Germany, though he is also interested in working with vernacular literary and legal traditions across Europe. He is currently co-piloting his first course as instructor of record, which explores the relationship between medievalism, transmedia storytelling, and the film industry through the lens of the Harry Potter movie series. Originally from the East Coast, Jake did his undergraduate studies in history and French at Providence College and is passionate about teaching, cooking, exploring new languages and places, and spending time outdoors. Above all, Jake hopes that his time as a Nanovic Graduate Fellow will inspire more fruitful dialogue between students of various disciplinary backgrounds in the name of better understanding contemporary problems in European life.

Coen was awarded Paul G. Tobin Dissertation Fellowship for the 2020-21 academic year. He also served as a Nanovic Graduate Fellow during the 2019-20 academic year.
Sarah Crane
Graduate Fellow, 2020-21

Sarah Crane
Graduate Fellow, 2020-21
scrane1@nd.edu
Sarah Crane is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Her work focuses on legal responses to the Holocaust, examining how two trials, the Frankfurt-Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, challenge conventional understandings of the relationship between law, democracy, and the Nazi legacy in the decades following the end of WWII.
Julian Dean
Graduate Fellow, 2020-22

Julian Dean
Graduate Fellow, 2020-22
jdean6@nd.edu
Julian is a doctoral candidate in the English department where he is writing his dissertation on postcolonial tragedy. Julian's research looks at how theatre movements that sprouted up at the moment of decolonization in various geographical locations all utilized tragedy as a form to express resistance to colonization and yet reservation towards nationalism.
Roberto De La Noval
Dissertation Fellow, 2019-20

Roberto De La Noval
Dissertation Fellow, 2019-20
Roberto De La Noval, Ph.D. candidate in the history of Christianity in the department of theology, received a 2019-20 Paul G. Tobin Nanovic Dissertation Completion Fellowship. His research concentrates on Eastern Christianity, from Origen of Alexandria’s biblical exegesis to medieval Byzantine theologies of religious images to 19th and 20th exiled Russian religious thinkers. He brings critical theory to bear on the study of ancient religious texts in the service of fresh and transformative readings; in turn, he uses the resources of the tradition in order to stake interventions in contemporary debates. A native speaker of Spanish who works with Russian texts, his forthcoming book is a translation of writings by the early 20th c. Marxist-turned-Orthodox priest Sergius Bulgakov, a political dissident who was exiled from his homeland. His popular writing has also appeared in a number of outlets for Catholic intellectual journalism, such as Commonweal, America Magazine, and Church Life Journal.
Timothy Derr
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22

Timothy Derr
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22
Tim Derr is a Master of Global Affairs and MBA candidate pursuing a Graduate Minor in Peace Studies. As a global development professional, Tim has worked as an NGO project manager, private and social enterprise consultant, and graduate researcher in North Macedonia, Germany, Armenia, India, and the United States. His research focuses on economic empowerment, sustainable development, sustainability politics/policy, and corporate ESG strategy. Through this research, Tim aims to contribute to a just transition to a more inclusive, equitable, and restorative economy that creates shared value for society.
Ala Fink
Dissertation Fellow, 2019-20

Ala Fink
Dissertation Fellow, 2019-20
Ala Fink, a Ph.D. candidate in English, received a 2019-20 Dominica and Frank Annese Dissertation Fellowship. Ala was able to complete and successfully defend the dissertation “Re-forming Righteousness: Milton’s Hebraic Poetics.” The dissertation argued that Milton’s theology and exegesis of righteousness was informed by Hebrew and Jewish exegesis, and that an ethics of righteousness shapes the poetics of Milton’s major poems. A second, long-term project involves the comparison of conceptualizations of literal interpretation in Reformation exegesis through an analysis of early modern discourse on literalism and the exegesis that attends it. She has presented papers at the Northeast MLA, the Newberry Library, and the RSA. She has served as an assistant editor for Milton Studies.
Imre Gabor Holtzer
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22

Imre Gabor Holtzer
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22
Imre Gábor Holtzer is a lawyer who is passionate about social issues which affect the East-Central European region. As a volunteer with the BAGázs Nonprofit Association, he provided legal assistance to members of the Roma community living in Hungarian slums. He also has volunteered with the SeriousFun Children’s Network, supporting the organization’s aim to provide life-changing experiences to cancer-afflicted and chronically ill children and their families. He has studied in Hungary, Germany, Italy, and in the United States, and he speaks Hungarian, English and German. Imre's research interest includes the drivers and possible solutions for corruption and low fertility rates in the ECE region.
Anthony Gaspar
Dissertation Fellow, 2021-22

Anthony Gaspar
Dissertation Fellow, 2021-22
agaspar@nd.edu
Anthony Gaspar, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history studying Byzantine/Mediterranean history, received a 2021-22 Dominica and Frank Annese Dissertation Fellowship.
Moritz S. Graefrath
Graduate Fellow, 2019-21

Moritz S. Graefrath
Graduate Fellow, 2019-21
mgraefra@nd.edu
Moritz S. Graefrath is a Ph.D. student in political science. Broadly speaking, his research interests include international relations theory, diplomatic history, and foreign policy analysis with a particular focus on Europe since 1919. His dissertation seeks to illuminate the role of power vacuums in international politics by answering a series of foundational questions: what are power vacuums? Why do states compete for control over some but not others? And what accounts for variation in the types of strategies they employ?
Harrison Greenleaf
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23

Harrison Greenleaf
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23
Harrison Greenleaf is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science, with his primary field being International Relations. He grew up in Michigan and graduated with a B.A. from the James Madison College at Michigan State University, double-majoring in International Relations and Political Theory. Harrison’s current research falls within the area of international security and alliance politics. More specifically, he is examining the effects of populism on how states form and manage security alliances.
Sehrazat Gulsum
Graduate Fellow, 2020-21

Sehrazat Gulsum
Graduate Fellow, 2020-21
smart@nd.edu
Sehrazat Gulsum is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology and Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Her primary research interest lies in the socio-political forces and conditions that facilitate or obstruct participatory and deliberative urban governance and the role of urban movements in shaping the city.
Alec Hahus
Graduate Fellow, 2020-22

Alec Hahus
Graduate Fellow, 2020-22
shahus@nd.edu
Alec Hahus is a Ph.D. student in Political Science specializing in international relations and comparative politics. His dissertation focuses on how security competition among great powers affects financial flows in the global economy. He also conducts research on religion and politics, nationalism, political backlash to globalization, and security studies. Before coming to Notre Dame, Alec received an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in International Studies and History from Centre College.
Spencer T.B. Hunt
Dissertation Fellow, 2021-22

Spencer T.B. Hunt
Dissertation Fellow, 2021-22
shunt2@nd.edu
Spencer T. B. Hunt is a Ph.D. candidate in Medieval Studies with Notre Dame's Medieval Institute. Spencer’s research interests include interreligious relations throughout the medieval Mediterranean with special focus on Christian-Muslim interactions in Medieval Spain. Spencer served as a Nanovic Graduate Fellow during the 2020-21 academic year. He received a Dominica and Frank Annese Dissertation Fellowship for 2021-22.
Jelena Jankovic Rankovic
Graduate Fellow, Spring 2019

Jelena Jankovic Rankovic
Graduate Fellow, Spring 2019
Jelena Jankovic-Rankovic, a Ph.D. student in anthropology, is a biocultural anthropologist specializing in migration and refugee studies. Her dissertation research work focuses on understanding the social processes and meanings underlying routinized social practices (RSPs) and their biological impacts, especially within encampment settings. By taking a within-site comparative approach to refugee populations living in Serbia, Jelena combines ethnographic analysis with physiological biomarkers to examine the impact of everyday lived experiences on social systems, values, identities, and health. Jelena holds an M. A. degree in International Peace Studies from University of Notre Dame and an M.A. degree in Strategies and Methods of Non-violent Social Change from University of Belgrade. She received her B. A. from University of Belgrade, majoring in Special Education and Rehabilitation.
Lora Jury
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23

Lora Jury
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23
Lora Jury is a British film scholar and 3rd year Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies, with a double minor in Gender Studies and FTT (Film, Television and Theater). They grew up in Wales and graduated from the University of Reading, with a BA in English Literature and Italian Studies, and studyied abroad at the Università degli Studi di Bergamo. Lora subsequently moved to the US to complete an MA in Italian Studies from the University of Oregon. Their current research is on the Italian and European colonial origins of the traveling performer, the concept of the “Freak Show,” and the perception of corporeal abnormality in Federico Fellini’s cinematic oeuvre. Further interests include story and narrative development for video games, and the historical, critical, theoretical and practical terrain of print, radio, film, television and digital media.
Shasta Kaul
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23

Shasta Kaul
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23
Shasta Kaul is a third year Political Science PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. She holds an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from the University of Oxford.

Through the works of Machiavelli and Kautilya, in her dissertation Shasta plans to explore how political realism can challenge and reframe existing approaches to value pluralism in modern democratic societies. She is also interested in how states, as the loci of power, have understood their own practical and normative functions over time.
Edith Lagarde
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23

Edith Lagarde
Graduate Fellow, 2022-23
Edith Lagarde is a third-year Ph.D. student in the History department at Notre Dame. While she enjoys studying most areas of medieval history, she is primarily interested in the religious, intellectual, and cultural history of the Medieval Mediterranean. In particular, her research focuses on papal communications with the Eastern Christian churches in Armenia and the Levant throughout the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries, as well East-West relations more broadly. Through this research, she hopes to explore different understandings of ecclesiology within the medieval church, as well as the larger political and religious environment shaped by these communications.
Paul McEldowney
Dissertation Fellow, 2019-20

Paul McEldowney
Dissertation Fellow, 2019-20
A Ph.D. candidate in the department of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Paul's research focuses on logic, the philosophy of logic, and the philosophy of mathematics. In his dissertation, Paul develops and defends a distinctively new model-theoretic approach to logicism inspired by recent work in model theory. He also has serious research interests in the history of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy (Kant, German Idealism, Early Analytic, Pragmatism, Phenomenology). Outside of philosophy, Paul is passionate about prison education and translating Vietnamese poetry. He received a 2019-20 Dominica and Frank Annese Dissertation Fellowship.
Valeria Mora-Hernández
Graduate Fellow, 2020-21

Valeria Mora-Hernández
Graduate Fellow, 2020-21
vmoraher@nd.edu
Valeria Mora-Hernández received her Ph.D. in Spanish May 2021. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the connections between violence and the process of constructing self-identity in texts by authors such as Cervantes, Zayas and Quevedo. Her research is a response, an attempt to understand violence in contemporary Spain by looking at its past through the representations of violence and identity in Early Modern Spanish Literature.
Eileen Morgan
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22

Eileen Morgan
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22
emwmorgan@nd.edu
Eileen Morgan’s research considers the intersection of medieval natural philosophical theory and common practice in recipes. By tracing the widespread medieval phenomenon of roasting peacocks and serving them in their skin as if they were alive, Morgan's interdisciplinary dissertation applies complex adaptive systems theory and network visualization to argue that medieval culinary recipes constitute a form of artisanal epistemology entangled with both Aristotelian natural philosophy and medieval racializing discourses prior to the Atlantic slave trade.

In addition to the Nanovic Graduate Fellowship, Morgan's doctoral research is supported by a Richard and Peggy Notebaert Premier Fellowship, an NDIAS Distinguished Graduate Fellowship, a Duffy Fellowship, and generous grants from the Nanovic Institute and the Medieval Academy of America.
Clare O'Hare
Graduate Fellow, 2019-21

Clare O'Hare
Graduate Fellow, 2019-21
cohare@nd.edu
Clare O’Hare works at the intersection of comparative politics and international political economy. She is especially interested legal pluralism. Current projects examine the role of corporate lawyers and multinational corporations in the diffusion of English common law institutional structures to civil law jurisdictions in Europe.
Andrea C. Peña-Vasquez
Dissertation Fellow, 2020-21

Andrea C. Peña-Vasquez
Dissertation Fellow, 2020-21
apenavas@nd.edu
Andrea Peña-Vasquez is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science, with a focus on comparative politics, and a Dominica and Frank Annese Dissertation Fellow at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. She is also affiliated with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include transnational migration from Sub-Saharan Africa to Western Europe and the experiences of immigrants with the bureaucratic state. In her dissertation research, she studies how housing policy and the municipal registry system affect the political integration of African immigrants across Spain. Andrea is also a Notre Dame Presidential Fellow and her research has been funded by the J. William Fulbright Foundation, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the John J. Reilly Center. Her work has been published in Surveyjournalen and Politics, Groups, and Identities (PGI).

She successfully defended her dissertation, "Between the Patrón and the Padrón: The Local Dimensions of Legal Status in Spain" on November 22, 2021.
Catherine (Kate) Perl
Graduate Fellow, Spring 2023

Catherine (Kate) Perl
Graduate Fellow, Spring 2023
Catherine (Kate) Perl, a PhD candidate in history, received the Dominica and Frank Annese dissertation fellowship for 2022-23. She studies primarily Muslim and Christian Iberia from the 11th to the mid-12th century – a highly decentralized period in the peninsula’s history. Her dissertation investigates how and why intellectual and artistic work took place, and what the products of cultural patronage illuminate about constructions of historical narratives, political theology, and relationships between creative work and power. For the past several years, she has co-organized the “Religion and Pluralism in the Medieval Mediterranean” working group through the Medieval Institute.

Kate is also committed to prison education and has spent a great deal of her time at ND working with the Moreau College Initiative at the Westville Correctional Facility.
Samuel Roberts
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22

Samuel Roberts
Graduate Fellow, 2021-22
Samuel Roberts is originally from Louisville, Kentucky. He joined the Notre Dame History Ph.D. program in 2020. Samuel is interested in the history of Christianity and the intellectual history of early modern Europe. His research explores humanist histories of philosophy during the Reformation and Enlightenment. Focusing on the De perenni philosophia of Vatican librarian Agostino Steuco, he hopes to show how scholars used the theory of “ancient theology” not only to create a European philosophical heritage, but also to interpret the non-European cultures and traditions encountered during the Age of Exploration.
Carli Steelman
Dissertation Fellow, 2021-22

Carli Steelman
Dissertation Fellow, 2021-22
csteelma@nd.edu
Carli Steelman is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and Peace Studies. Her dissertation will focus on collective memory of violence. She primarily works in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Northern Ireland. Additional projects use Geographic Information Systems to analyze religious and civi participation at the University of Notre Dame.

Carli Steelman was awarded a Paul G. Tobin Dissertation Fellowship for the 2021-22 academic year.
Vincent L. Strand, SJ
Graduate Fellow, 2020-21

Vincent L. Strand, SJ
Graduate Fellow, 2020-21
vstrand@nd.edu
Vincent L. Strand, SJ, is a Ph.D. student in systematic theology. He specializes in the theology of grace, particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theology. His current research focuses on the German Catholic theologian Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888) and on the intersection of the theology of grace and church-state relations.
Anna Vincenzi
Graduate Fellow, 2019-20

Anna Vincenzi
Graduate Fellow, 2019-20
Anna Vincenzi graduated in May 2020 with a Ph.D. in history. With numerous populist movements gaining popularity across Europe and challenging the EU’s existence, Anna's research looks at a time when Europe was at a similar crossroad, the "Age of Revolution" (1765-1848). How could the inequalities of the Old Regime be solved? How could sovereignty be put in the people? How to pursue social and political change? These were crucial questions for peoples across Europe in the eighteenth century and remain crucial questions for European democracies today.