Two CLACS-Affiliated PhD Students Win Fulbright-Hays Award

November 3, 2017 Brown University Website

Jerome Marston, a fourth-year Political Science student and Daniel McDonald, a third-year History student have been awarded the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award. This award provides funding for doctoral students to conduct research outside of the U.S. for 6-12 months. Marston will be using his Fulbright to travel to Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia and McDonald to São Paulo, Brazil for a year. 

Marston researches violence and human rights abuses in Latin America. Specifically, his dissertation examines forced displacement in Colombian cities. Next year, with Fulbright-Hays funding, he will spend additional time in Bogotá and Medellín conducting interviews and gathering quantitative data.

“The Fellowship is significant because it gives me more time in-country. My dissertation will improve because I am able to give increased attention to the cultural context of my research and devote additional time to the project,” says Marston.

McDonald’s dissertation project examines how urban residents and grassroots groups in São Paulo negotiated state repression, economic crises, and urban problems during Brazil’s military dictatorship and transition to democracy. McDonald explains that much of the documentation from the period resides in social movement headquarters, churches, community centers, private collections of activists, and still-active welfare agency buildings. “As South America's largest metropolis, São Paulo's sheer size and complexity makes the twelve months of support offered by the fellowship all the more necessary to systematically work through these collections and interviews,” he says.

Drawing on his current work with Brown's "Opening the Archives" project, he will also aid in digitization of these document collections—many of which are currently in precarious states—through his work with the Center for Memory of the East Zone, to preserve them for future researchers.