Announcing the 2026-27 Dissertation Fellows

CISSR is pleased to announce our Dissertation Fellows for the 2026-27 academic year. Representing four departments and disciplines, our fellows will complete their dissertations focusing on international and transnational social science research. The CISSR Dissertation Completion Grant provides funding, office space, and research support to outstanding doctoral candidates conducting innovative research on global topics. This fellowship reflects CISSR’s commitment to advancing rigorous social science scholarship at the University of Chicago. 

The Dissertation Fellows’ projects span various global regions, demonstrating the value of interdisciplinary and international research. CISSR aims to continue developing international social science research by supporting and growing an interdisciplinary community of researchers within the university and beyond. 

The CISSR Faculty Board is delighted to present this cohort of dissertation fellows: 

Chris Hong (History) 

This dissertation challenges the persistent historiographical characterization of Louis XIV’s France as an intolerant, purely militaristic state seeking “universal monarchy.” While recent scholarship has reinterpreted the British, Dutch, and Ottoman empires as modernizing projects, the French Empire remains largely tethered to an older paradigm of continental dominion. By integrating the literature on developmental states, this study proposes a new conceptual framework: the developmental hegemon. The term “developmental” characterizes the crown’s efforts to steward transformative modernization through the reform of fiscal, commercial, and governing institutions. Simultaneously, “hegemon”" reflects the innovative diplomatic strategies employed to manage a globalizing Europe, fractured by confessional and colonial rivalries. Shifting the focus from metropolitan centers to peripheral and transnational archives, this dissertation uncovers an empire defined by "blue-water" Caribbean reforms and liberalized trade. Evidence from Swiss, Swedish, and Spanish archives further reveals a cosmopolitan commercial reality, illustrated by cross-confessional merchant networks. Ultimately, this work argues that the France under the Sun King was a modernizing power aspiring toward institutional leadership, providing a radical reassessment of French imperial history across the early-modern epoch of global commerce. 

Dissertation: “Developmental Hegemony and Imperial Enlightenment in Louis XIV’s France, 1680-1715” 

Hera Shakil (Comparative Human Development) 

This dissertation examines the relationship between political articulation, social identity, and
governance, exploring how the class and caste backgrounds of political actors shape the
imaginaries and projects they pursue. This work analyzes how narratives of development, efficiency, and anti-corruption function as moral frameworks in contemporary democratic politics, and how liberal-centrist political movements navigate ideological pressures in polarized environments. The project is an ethnography of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in New Delhi over the past decade, tracing its emergence from an anti-corruption movement to occupy a liberal-centrist position in Indian politics. Drawing on over 200 interviews and field work with party members, government officials, and urban-poor residents, Shakil traces the party's ideological evolution and its negotiations with competing political forces like Hindu Nationalism. This case study serves as a lens into a broader global phenomenon: the trajectory of liberal-centrist political projects under conditions of right-wing hegemony. Hera situates AAP within comparative conversations about technocratic populism, good-governance discourse, and the political incorporation of marginalized communities, particularly urban-poor Dalits and Muslims. This work contributes to scholarship on populism, urban politics, and the sociology of political elites in the Global South.

Dissertation: “The Common Man’s Party: Middle Class Politics, Anti-Corruptionism, and the Limits of Technocratic Populism in India” 

 Gabriel Groz (History) 

This dissertation offers a comparative study of fiscal state formation in seventeenth-century Ming-Qing China and Stuart England, examining a period rarely featured in comparisons of Chinese and European political-economic development.  

Across the seventeenth century, the fiscally-mediated relationship between state and society came under severe pressure in both China and England, two instances of a broader global or “general” crisis. By century’s end, that crisis culminated in radically different institutional paradigms. In England, it produced Europe’s first public fiscal state, marrying centrally-managed commercial taxation, parliamentary power, and public credit. In China, it resulted in the consolidation of a distinctly centralized, fiscally conservative autocracy, in which the monarchical court operated as a creditor, rather than a debtor. These results shaped the state-society relationship and state capacity in both polities for centuries to come. This dissertation shows these divergent outcomes were not inevitable; nor did they follow entirely different logics. They were instead settlements to parallel struggles over similar issues: among them, elite constituencies’ fiscal claims, the powers of center and locality, the distribution of fiscal burdens, and the evolving relationship between state and capital markets. Exploring these processes, the possibilities they raised and foreclosed, this dissertation reconstructs the contested, contingent origins of the modern Chinese and English fiscal states. 

Dissertation: “The Politics of State Finance in Early-Modern China and England ” 

Adam Saxton (Political Science) 

The Labeling Game in International Politics, examines how states deploy legal labels to classify conflict and the consequences that follow. In practice, states apply a wide range of labels to conflict, including “war,” “quarantine,” “police operation,” and “special military operation,” which often diverge from the material reality on the ground. This project departs from conventional approaches in international law that either emphasize state compliance or how states use international law to legitimize their actions. Instead, Saxton looks at how states use law proactively as a classifying tool, as declarative speech act, that can empower later action. His research question is: why do states select different legal labels, and what downstream effects does this have on international law and affected populations? 

Empirically, the project draws on archival research to examine how legal and strategic considerations shape labeling decisions. Drawing on diverse archival sources, Saxton analyzes inter- and intrastate wars over the past two centuries, ranging from the Quasi-War of 1798 to contemporary counterterrorism campaigns, including World War II, the Arab-Israel Wars, and the Algerian War of Independence. This dissertation contributes to literatures in international law, strategic studies, escalation management, and rhetoric in international relations.  

Dissertation: “The Labeling Game in International Politics” 

 Priyanjali Mitra (Sociology)

The dissertation examines how inequality is produced and reproduced within working-class migrant households under conditions of urban informality over time. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research in Gurugram, India, it asks why similarly positioned households generate divergent intergenerational outcomes despite shared exposure to precarious labor markets. Mitra argues that households do not merely absorb instability but actively organize it by redistributing labor, time, and risk across members over time. In doing so, the dissertation reconceptualizes precarity not as an individual or structural condition, but as a relational and temporal process constituted within the household. 

The analysis develops a framework of three interlocking processes—classification, tethering, and moral adjudication—through which inequality is organized across labor markets, households, and neighborhoods. Workers are differentially sorted into labor hierarchies through socially embedded forms of recognition; households allocate members’ time and aspirations in ways that stabilize survival while unevenly preserving future possibilities; and neighborhood-based moral evaluations convert social worth into material outcomes. Together, these processes relocate governance into everyday social relations under conditions of informality. By foregrounding the household as a central mediating unit, the dissertation contributes to scholarship on urban informality, social reproduction, and global South urbanism, showing how inequality persists not only through structural constraints but through the intergenerational organization of futurity itself. 

Dissertation: “Governed Lives: Relational Power, Moral Economy, and Urban Precarity in Migrant North India” 

We look forward to supporting these fellows as they complete their dissertation projects and contribute to the vibrant intellectual life of CISSR.