The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to announce that returning graduate fellow Andrew Zhao has received an Edward E. Hildebrand Research Fellowship for Summer 2025.
Andrew Zhao is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science, studying how identity and questions of who we are intersect with politics.
Andrew's Hildebrand Fellowship will support a project exploring the long-term political effects of Canada's Indian residential school system. The schools left a well-documented legacy of physical and psychological harm to survivors and their kin. But another legacy remains under-explored: how did residential schools affect the politics of their surrounding communities? The present project focuses on this political legacy. Specifically, it investigates whether residential schools embedded anti-Indigenous beliefs in nearby communities that persist to this day. Fellowship funds will support visits to several Canadian archives that contain school records and testimony, as well as French-language interpretation of school administrators' personal papers.
Andrew holds a BA in political science and philosophy from the University of Toronto, where he received the Suzanne and Edwin Goodman Prize as the top graduating student in specializing in political science. Before coming to Berkeley, he worked for several years in public opinion research.