FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“I am delighted to announce that for another year running the National Institute of Social Sciences has received an outstanding number of high quality submissions for its 2023 Dissertation Grant competition. After extensive deliberations, the Grants Committee has decided to award grants to five candidates again this year,” said President of the National Institute, Fred Larsen.
“Our ability to offer so many grants to worthy candidates this year was facilitated by the Board of Trustees’ decision last year to increase funding for the Dissertation Grant award program and is supported by the continuing generosity of our Trustees, Members, and friends of the National Institute. The National Institute looks to strengthen its mission by growing our Grant-making activities and supporting multiple scholars doing promising research in the social sciences,” he added.
This year’s winners of the Dissertation Grants are:
Roger S. Cadena, Jr., doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame
Paige Harris, doctoral candidate in Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Ji Soo Hong, doctoral candidate in History at Brown University
Kyoungeun Lee, doctoral candidate in Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin
Anjuli Webster, doctoral candidate in African History at Emory University
“Again this year the Grants Committee solicited submissions from a very wide range of top ranked graduate institutions, and the competition yielded an impressive number of first-rate proposals. The winning candidates prevailed against very stiff competition from several other excellent candidates in a broad range of research disciplines” 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.
Roger S. Cadena, Jr.
Roger S. Cadena, Jr. is a doctoral candidate of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Roger’s research generally exists at the intersections of race, ethnicity, culture, and politics. Specifically, their research is interested in understanding how racialization shapes Latinxs’ social and political identifications.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with US Latinxs from around the country, Roger’s dissertation is organized around three major themes. First, it seeks to understand how Latinxs construct interpretations of social structure, social identifications, and political parties. Second, it seeks to uncover how Latinxs connect those interpretations to political behavior. And third, it seeks to understand how Latinxs communicate those interpretations to their families, peers, and colleagues. Especially within the context of political uncertainties, this project’s goal to better inform people about the Latinxs’ heterogenous social and political lives and how Latinxs currently and in the future will map onto national political cleavages. The National Institute of Social Sciences Dissertation Grant will fund conference travel and presentations, interviewee incentives, transcription services, and qualitative analysis software.
Prior to attending Notre Dame, Roger was a social studies teacher in Chicago Public Schools. Roger also received an M.A. in International Relations at the University of Chicago and a B.A. in History-Social Science Education at Illinois State University. Roger’s research on Latinx Republicans has been published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. As well, Roger has a project elaborating W.E.B. Du Bois’ theorization of racial ideologies and school curricula currently under review at a sociology journal.
Paige Harris
Paige Harris is a doctoral candidate in Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying interpersonal relationships, health, and well-being. In particular, she investigates how health behaviors (physical activity, sleep) can be a catalyst for good health and happy relationships.
In her first year of graduate school, Paige developed a theoretical model linking physical activity to positive social outcomes. She argues that engaging in physical activity provides individuals with emotional, cognitive, and physiological resources that enable them to think, feel, and behave more positively toward others, which then promotes relationship closeness and connection. For her dissertation, she will conduct a quasi-experimental field study and an experimental lab study to test her developing model. Paige is grateful to receive support from the National Institute of Social Sciences Dissertation Grant that will enable her to successfully complete these studies and contribute to the science of interpersonal relationships and health.
In addition to her doctoral degree, Paige is completing a master’s degree in Applied Statistics with an emphasis in Data Science. Prior to attending UC Santa Barbara, Paige earned a B.S. and special honors in Human Development and Family Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin.
Ji Soo Hong
Ji Soo Hong is a doctoral candidate in History at Brown University. She studies economic and environmental history of the USSR as well as the history of the U.S.-Soviet relations.
Her dissertation traces Soviet postwar economic development focusing on the transnational history of the “synthetic revolution” that was central to the global political economy by the 1970s. By doing so, Ji Soo offers an original account of the Cold War by embedding its history in the context of what scholars call the “synthetica”—the material world increasingly made of synthetics. Her dissertation shows that in the 1950s and 1960s synthetic materials produced from petroleum—petrochemicals—rapidly replaced traditional materials. Despite the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union sought intense exploitation of petroleum and petrochemicals and recognized mutual benefits in cooperating over resource expeditions, factory operations, and logistics. An era defined by political confrontations was also an era of convergent economic goals.
The 2023 National Institute Dissertation Grant supports this dissertation, including research in the National Archives. Prior to coming to Brown, Ji Soo received her B.A. in History and Sociology and M.A. in History from Seoul National University.
Kyoungeun Lee
Kyoungeun Lee is a doctoral candidate in Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her long-term research goal is to identify the critical factors that underlie the heterogeneity in cognition in late adulthood by investigating the complex connections between the aging brain, body, and behavior. Specifically, her current research interest is exploring the impact of aging on episodic memory, using brain-imaging techniques including EEG and fMRI.
Kyoungeun’s dissertation project explores how mind-body connection can affect one’s episodic memory and how it changes across the adult lifespan. Within this project, she is particularly fascinated by interoception, the ability to perceive and interpret internal bodily signals, such as heart rate and breathing. By leveraging a diverse range of methodologies including behavioral experiments, psychophysiology, and brain-imaging, she aims to elucidate how interoception serves as a key individual difference factor impacting episodic memory. Kyoungeun firmly believes that the knowledge gained from this study has the potential to pave the way for the development of future memory interventions.
Anjuli Webster
Anjuli Webster is a PhD candidate in African History at Emory University. She has trained and taught in history and anthropology in South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States. Her research and teaching centre southern Africa as a world-historical location in global transformations between 1700-1900. Understanding how and why histories of colonial conquest and violence continue to shape the present is a central concern of her work as a historian.
Webster’s dissertation, ‘Fluid Empires’ explores transformations in sovereignty and ecology in southeast Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries. Working with archival sources in English, isiZulu, Afrikaans, French, and Portuguese, she analyses disputes and collaborations between the British and Portuguese empires, Brazilian and American slavers, African kingdoms and communities, Dutch-speaking voortrekkers, and American concessionaires. She argues that these processes slowly shaped transformations in land and waterscapes in southeast Africa, across the borders of contemporary Mozambique, Swaziland, and South Africa, forming an environmental foundation for the military, and political economic consolidation of conquest in the late nineteenth century.