Nadia Almasalkhi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on political transnationalism in Middle Eastern diasporas and the phenomenon of political non-participation. Her dissertation seeks to understand why participation by out-of-country voters sharply increased in Lebanese elections between 2018 and 2022, and why this increase was uneven across destination countries where the diaspora live. Specifically, her project will compare the political engagement of Lebanese in Canada, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, examining how different...
Claire Chun is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies with a designated emphasis in gender, women and sexuality Studies. Her dissertation research examines the ways that Asian North American diasporic art and media critically engage issues of settler colonial and militarized imperial violence through aesthetic practices of more-than-human kinship and entanglements.
Claire's Hildebrand Fellowship will support her field research in Vancouver and Toronto where she will explore how Asian diasporic artists based in Canada complicate notions of Asianness by grappling with...
Allison is a Ph.D. student in city and regional planning. Her work takes a critical approach to housing policy and land use planning. She examines the barriers to creating truly affordable housing, and how municipalities can deliver on their housing goals.
Allison's Hildebrand Fellowship will enable her to study Housing Now, an affordable housing program in her home city of Toronto. Housing Now aims at developing affordable housing through public-private partnerships and surplus city-owned land. Allison's research is motivated by the limited assessments of Housing Now's progress,...
Caylee Hong is the recipient of an Edward Hildebrand Research Fellowship for Summer 2021 for her research project "Orphaned Wells: The Impact of Corporate Bankruptcy on Energy Infrastructures and Municipal Futures in Alberta and California".
Caylee is a Ph.D. student in sociocultural anthropology with an emphasis on legal issues. Caylee's research examines the impacts of finance, including debt and bankruptcy, on infrastructure development and decommissioning. Her Hildebrand Fellowship will provide funding for her dissertation project, exploring how corporate bankruptcy law shapes...
Jennifer is a PhD student in Romance Languages and Literatures (Linguistics Track), hosted in the French department. Her research examines the intersection of grammatical gender and social gender.
Jennifer’s Hildebrand fellowship will support her research on variation in non-binary French and the social challenges non-binary Francophones face in using this gender-affirming French variety in their everyday lives. She uses a mixed-methods approach to examine both what non-binary French forms are gaining popularity, and changing social attitudes toward these word forms. She is excited...
AJ Kurdi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a designated emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. His dissertation research is a comparative study on different forms of ethnic minority queer organizing in Montreal, Budapest, and Paris, and how they shape the priorities and political orientations of mainstream LGBTQI movements, laws and public policies in North America and Europe.
AJ's Hildebrand Fellowship will support his fieldwork in Montreal during the monthlong Fierté Montréal celebration. He will examine the...
Britt Leake is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science. His research focuses on understanding the conditions under which democracy succeeds or fails in societies with extensive ethnolinguistic or religious diversity. His dissertation project uses John Rawls’s theory of public reason as a frame through which to examine historical cases from four countries (Canada, India, Lebanon, and Spain) in which different cultural groups tried to make compromises on the terms of a social contract that would be legitimate in the eyes of each group. Britt’s research on Canada will focus...
Madeleine is a first-year Ph.D. student in the history of art specializing in twentieth century art of North America, with an emphasis on folk art and modernism of the United States. The Hildebrand Fellowship will facilitate Madeleine’s research on pioneering Canadian nationalist artist Joyce Wieland (1930-1998). Promoting unity between francophone and anglophone Canada while maintaining critical distance through absurdist humor, Wieland’s work interrogates US economic and ecological interference in Canada through a feminist and ecocritical lens, utilizing unconventional mediums like...
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Mindy Price is the recipient of an Edward Hildebrand Research Fellowship for AY 2020-21 for her research project "New Agrarian Frontiers: Power, Sovereignty, and Public-Nonprofit Partnerships in the Northwest Territories, Canada".
Mindy is a doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. An environmental sociologist and political ecologist, her research focuses on indigenous food sovereignty and the effects of climate change on agriculture in the far north. Mindy received her B.A. in sociology from Emory University, and...
Taesoo Song is a Ph.D. student in city and regional planning. He holds a B.A. (Economics) and M.S. (Urban Planning and Engineering) from Yonsei University. He is interested in the role of housing policy and neighborhood planning in promoting more equitable and socially just urban and community development, particularly for low-income and minority households. Before starting his Ph.D. program, Taesoo worked as a researcher for the Seoul Institute in South Korea, where he investigated the ongoing gentrification in Seoul’s Historic Downtown area, its impacts on local businesses and residents...