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,...
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 supported 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. For this project, she conducted ethnographic research in LGBTQ+ communities in and around the city of Montreal. She uses a mixed-methods approach to examine both what non-...
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...
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management
Jocelyn Liu is the recipient of a Canadian Studies Undergraduate Research Fellowship for Summer 2026. Jocelyn is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in environmental science and environmental economics & policy in the Rausser College of Natural Resources. Jocelyn grew up in the Greater Toronto Area, where she developed a passion for community-engaged policy, especially related to the housing and energy sectors. She has been a research assistant for various projects across the departments of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, Geography, and UC Berkeley Law’s Center...
Lydia is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, public health, and immigration at the turn of the 20th century. She is particularly interested in the work of settlement houses and milk committees in urban spaces, and how immigrant women engaged with reform projects and could lay claim to social citizenship through their mothering and hygienic practices.
Lydia’s research on Canada will explore connections between clean milk initiatives and constructions of whiteness within the transnational history of the settlement movement...
