FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“I am thrilled to announce that the National Institute of Social Sciences received an unprecedented number of submissions for its 2021 Dissertation Grant competition. After extensive deliberations, the Grants Committee has decided to award grants to two candidates this year,” said President of the National Institute, Fred Larsen.
“In connection with these awards, the Board of Trustees has approved expanded future funding for the Dissertation Grant award program in order to recognize multiple scholars doing promising research in the social sciences,” he added.
Emma Gilheany, a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and Francisco Lara-Garcia, a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Columbia University, were each awarded the prestigious prize for their dissertation proposals. Each awardee will be given an unrestricted grant of $5,000.00 to apply toward the research and completion of their Ph.D. dissertations.
“This year the Grants Committee solicited submissions from the widest range of graduate institutions in the history of the program, and the competition resulted in the largest number of first-rate proposals the National Institute has ever received. Ms Gilheany and Mr. Lara-Garcia won against stiff competition from several other excellent candidates in this year’s focus areas of Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, and Sociology,” commented Grants Committee Chairman Jonathan Piel.
The National Institute is delighted to continue its direct support of graduate studies in the social sciences by helping to fund these scholars’ promising and groundbreaking research.
You can learn more about the National Institute’s Grants Program here.
Emma Gilheany
Emma Gilheany is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She studies indigenous sovereignty, settler colonialism, American imperialism, and the recent history of the circumpolar North. She is particularly interested in using archaeological epistemologies to intersect with and serve Inuit sovereignty.
Her dissertation explores 20th-century processes of missionization and militarization in Nunatsiavut. She uses archaeological, ethnographic, historical, and multimedia methodologies to rethink how resistance to imperialism has been theorized using the material record, and to critique the concept of a global Anthropocene. She argues that climate histories should include hyper-local approaches, illuminating specific institutions responsible for environmental decay, while nuancing the experiences of people who have been figured as vulnerable in the context of the melting North.
The 2021 NISS Dissertation Grant will support remote interviews and long-distance collaboration with Nunatsiavummiut, as well as archival research at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem Pennsylvania. Prior to the University of Chicago, she earned a B.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University.
Francisco Lara-García
Francisco Lara-García is a doctoral candidate and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University in the City of New York. His research examines the connection between locales of immigrant arrival, immigrant well-being and public policy.
Currently, Francisco is the lead investigator for the Mexicans in Albuquerque and Tucson Integration Study (MATIS), his dissertation project. This project seeks to better integrate migration studies with urban sociology by investigating the role of local institutional factors in producing differential integration paths for immigrants in cities in the U.S. The project leverages a strategic comparison of Tucson, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico, two cities that are similar except for a critical difference in their institutional histories. This work draws on a variety of qualitative and quantitative strategies for this analysis, including survey, interview and ethnographic methods, to generate findings that can inform immigrant integration efforts at the local level.
The 2021 National Institute Dissertation Grant supports this dissertation, including interviews with Mexican immigrants in Tucson and Albuquerque. Prior to coming to Columbia, he received a Masters of Urban Planning at Harvard University and a Bachelors in Sociology, Latin American Studies and Political Science from the University of Arizona.