Student Programs

2019–2020 Kenneth I. Juster Fellows

Portrait of Kenneth I. JusterThe Weatherhead Center is pleased to announce its 2019–2020 class of Juster Fellows. Now in its ninth year, this grant initiative is made possible by the generosity of the Honorable Kenneth I. Juster, former chair of the Center’s Advisory Committee, and current United States Ambassador to India. Ambassador Juster has devoted much of his education, professional activities, public service, and nonprofit endeavors to international affairs and is deeply engaged in promoting international understanding and advancing international relations. The Center’s Juster grants support undergraduates whose projects may be related to thesis research but may have broader experiential components as well. The newly named Juster Fellows—all of whom will be undertaking their international experiences this winter or early spring—are:  

Frances Hisgen (History and History of Art & Architecture) will study the relationships between white British and Chinese peoples in the British Empire in China and in Hong Kong, with a focus on Eurasian life within networks of segregation regulated by colonial laws and informal custom. 

Julianna Kardish (Visual & Environmental Studies and Anthropology) will conduct creative ethnographic research about the grounded realities of homeless Capetonian women navigating postapartheid Cape Town during a four-year-long water shortage. 

Reshini Premaratne (Social Studies and Middle Eastern Studies) seeks to understand why the Middle East as a region and Lebanon as a case study has a relationship between remittances and domestic conflict that differs from the global trends. 

Reade Rossman (History & Literature, with a secondary field in Spanish) will begin thesis research on beauty salons as sites of both racial construction and economic mobility in women of the Dominican Republic and the Dominican diaspora in New York.

Raphaëlle Soffe (Social Studies) will study the connection between the decline of recent public services in the UK and the Brexit referendum and the working-class "left behind" regions. 

Ben Sorkin (Sociology, with a secondary field in Educational Studies) will examine US-Russia relations and the role of education diplomacy on these relations through the experiences of American and Russian study abroad students in Russia.

Kexin “Cathy” Sun (Social Studies) will examine why women become involved in civil resistance movements, how gender norms impact the nature of their engagement, and how their involvement changes the process and outcomes of these movements in the context of East Asia. 

Image of the 2018-2019 Juster Fellows with Ken Juster

Caption

The 2018–2019 Juster Fellows with the Honorable Kenneth I. Juster, at a lunch at Harvard Faculty Club on September 23, 2019. Credit: Michelle Nicholasen