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...
Luis Amaya Madrid is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Originally from the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, he is particularly interested in thinking about history of Indigeneity on the Pacific coast of North America. The Pacific coast was naturally the last stop of the extractive project of the colonial nation state in Mexico, Canada and the United States, and his work seeks to uncover archives and connections to think about Indigenous cosmologies and lifeways on the Pacific.
The Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship will support Luis’s...
Alex Chow is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research examines the political economy of Hong Kong and its diaspora, focusing on the interplay of emotions, institutions, and decolonization in shaping contested ideals of freedom, fairness, and justice. His dissertation traces how successive generations of Hong Kong activists and communities—from the Cold War era to the present-day diaspora—have redefined freedom under shifting geopolitical and economic conditions.
Alex’s Hildebrand Fellowship project, "Affective Politics and Shifting Alliances: The...
Alexandra is a PhD student in the Department of History. Her research focuses on small local newspapers and international activism in the late 20th century. Her dissertation project examines the work of queer journalists during the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the ACT UP protest movement. Her Hildebrand Fellowship will support her travel to Toronto, where she will explore the critical role of the Canadian queer press in combating the disease.
Alexandra holds a BA in history from Occidental College. She worked as an editor before arriving at Berkeley.
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,...
Sophie is a Master of Public Affairs student at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Her research studies the positive societal impacts derived from investment in sport and recreation programs in Canada. Her Hildebrand Fellowship will support her capstone project, a policy benefit-cost analysis on the impacts of increasing federal funding to Canada's national sports organizations. Specifically, she will seek to quantify the social impact of these expenditures, and whether increased funding leads to general improvements across a variety of health and wellbeing measures. Her...
Hannah is a PhD student in the History of Art Department. She studies 20th-century visual culture, with a focus on visual serial print media and its relationship to US-based resistance movements. Her Fellowship will support her research into the 1922 film Nanook of the North, which was filmed in the Canadian Arctic with Inuit actors.The film's distribution included promotional materials and immersive theater lobbies displaying Inuit life. Hannah's project, "In the Actual Arctic", explores how those promotional materials dramatically shaped perceptions of the Inuit in the United...
Jessica is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality studies. Her research takes up the late-nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest borderlands as a site where Indigenous dispossession and Chinese exclusion emerged as intertwined processes through the building up of the Canada-US border. Examining encounters between Chinese migrants and Indigenous nations in the aftermath of the US Chinese Exclusion Act, her dissertation considers how seemingly minor instances of contact or border crossing had transnational policy...
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...
Lianne is a PhD student in History, with a designated emphasis on Jewish studies. Her current project looks at a history of the Canadian state through the lens of Jewish institutions. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Montreal's growing Jewish community organized its own educational and healthcare institutions under the confessional system then prevalent in Quebec. As the government expanded its role in public services over the 20th century, these institutions operated in dialogue with authorities increasingly involved in funding and regulating areas once exclusively overseen by...
