The International Division is proud to announce the 12 recipients of the Summer 2026 Graduate Student Summer Fieldwork Awards. These $4,000 grants enable UW–Madison graduate students to conduct at least six weeks of primary research and fieldwork outside of the United States over the summer months. This year’s cohort represents a wide array of academic inquiries, ranging from political memory and international diplomacy to environmental conservation and digital media. Read more about the awardees below.
Magna Mohapatra
Project: Satire as Affective Democracy: Tracing Political Outrage and Willful Care through Mediation of Stand-up Comedy Economy in India
Site: India
Magna Mohapatra is a PhD Student in the Department of Anthropology with a minor in history and film. Magna is currently working on the production of political affect through the ethnography of satire and comedy cultures in India. Her research interests span decolonial theory, affect, humour, stand-up comedy, media cultures, political violence, anti-capitalist movements and cultural critique in contemporary Indian society. With the Graduate Student Summer Fieldwork Award, Magna will be conducting participant observations of the production processes of satire and comedy performance circuits in Mumbai, India. Through her dissertation fieldwork, Magna hopes to expand research on the affective political economy of satire cultures.
Noor Hamwy
Project: Anti-Jewish Communal Violence in Colonial Tunisia
Site: Tunisia
Noor Hamwy is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Political Science specializing in political violence, with an empirical focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Her research examines why communal violence against minorities erupts in some cities and not others, and why ordinary neighbors become perpetrators. In summer 2026, she will conduct archival research and interview members of Djerba’s Jewish community in Tunisia to reconstruct anti-Jewish violence in the long interwar period.
Astghik Markosyan
Project: Gray Wolf Ecology and Protection in Armenia
Site: Armenia
Astghik Markosyan is a PhD student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and a member of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab. She has over eight years of experience in wildlife protection and human-wildlife conflict, and previously led a Human-Wildlife Conflict Study Program in Armenia, working with rural communities to address conflicts between people and large carnivores.
Her research focuses on improving coexistence between people and gray wolves in Armenia. During summer 2026, she will conduct fieldwork in northern Armenia, particularly in Shirak Province, where livestock grazing overlaps with wolf habitat and conflicts are common. Markosyan’s fieldwork will involve collecting ecological and human dimension data on wolf presence and human-wildlife conflict in pastoral landscapes, including field observations and working with local communities.
Benjamin Chin-Hung Kao
Project: Pokémon Problems – On the Contemporary (Re)Production of Settler Colonial Histories in Hokkaidō, Japan
Site: Japan
Benjamin Chin-Hung Kao is a PhD student in geography from Brazil and Taiwan, whose master’s thesis explored the underlying misogynistic and settler colonial logics of Japanese nationalism through the Persona 4 Golden video game. His doctoral project focuses on explicating the settler colonial undertones of video game worlds and tourism projects in Hokkaido, Japan, associated with the Pokémon franchise. In summer 2026, he will be conducting archival work in Hokkaido looking at materials related to human-wildlife conflicts, as well as land use changes over time, to compare them to discourses about Pokémon-human interactions and ecology in Pokémon video games set in Hokkaido.
Eric Agyekum
Project: Journalistic Authority in the Context of Platform and Linguistic Plurality
Site: Ghana
Eric Boansi Agyekum is a PhD student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research explores journalism practice, digital media and counter-misinformation interventions, with a focus on their political, social and epistemic consequences. Prior to joining UW–Madison, Eric was an assistant lecturer at the University of Media, Arts and Communication-Institute of Journalism (UniMAC), formerly the Ghana Institute of Journalism.
This summer 2026 fieldwork forms part of Eric’s larger research project on how the media produces knowledge, lay claim to authority over truth, and shape audience reception to information from the media. His visit to Ghana this summer is the starting point for his year-long ethnographic research that involves newsroom visits, digital tracing, and audience study.
Anastasiia Andreeva
Project: Political Afterlife of the Gulag: Forced Displacement, Human Capital, and Local Development
Site: Kazakhstan
Anastasiia Andreeva is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science. Her research explores the political legacies of Gulag concentration camps, with interests spanning historical political economy, memory politics, and identity.
Megan Piton
Project: A Community-Based Participatory Approach to Developing Women’s Health Education in San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala
Site: Guatemala
Megan Piton is a medical student in the School of Medicine and Public Health with interests in global health and community-based research. Her work this summer will focus on understanding health priorities identified by the community in San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala, then developing an educational tool that is both culturally responsive and locally sustainable.
Megan plans to conduct interviews with local health promoters and community members to better understand women’s health priorities in the region, the questions women most frequently have about their health, and the barriers that currently exist to effective health education. The ultimate goal of this work is to inform the development of an educational material that addresses the topics of most relevance to women in San Lucas Tolimán. During this experience, Megan is excited to strengthen her skills in qualitative research while learning from local partners about effective approaches to community-centered health education.
Mirella Maria
Project: Digital Curatorial Quilombismo: Cultural Memory and Algorithmic Resistance in Afro-Brazilian Museums
Site: Brazil
Mirella Maria is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, where she is completing her dissertation “Digital Curatorial Quilombismo: A Comparative Study of Digital Curatorial Strategies in Afrodiasporic Art Spaces in Brazil, Colombia, and Puerto Rico.” Her research examines how Afro-Brazilian, Colombian, and Puerto Rican museums develop digital curatorial strategies that honor material culture while navigating algorithmic systems that marginalize Black cultural content. This summer,she will conduct fieldwork across Salvador, Brasília, Goiás, and São Paulo, visiting eight institutions and interviewing curators, educators, and community leaders. Her work has been published by Routledge and MASP, and presented at LASA, Harvard’s Hutchins Center, and other institutions in Europe.
Mirella has been selected to receive the Summer 2026 BLAC Foundation/International Division Supplemental Award, a $1,000 supplemental grant for International Division Graduate Summer Fieldwork Award recipients pursuing international field research in the global south on topics related to art, language, or culture.
Christopher Hulshof
Project: Between Empires and Nation: Covert Diplomacy and the Making of Southeast Asia’s Postwar Order, 1945–1967
Site: Philippines
Christopher Hulshof is a dissertator in the Department of History. His dissertation is a trans-imperial history of twentieth-century decolonization, told through the prism of shifting local dynamics of growing American influence in Southeast Asia during the early Cold War.
His research provides fresh insight into how volatile, multilinear exchanges between American agents, European imperial officials, and emerging national elites shaped both U.S. global hegemony and local independence movements. This summer, he will be conducting research at the Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs archives on U.S.-Philippines relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Otavio Soares Barros
Project: Racial Equity Policy Implementation and the Making of Race in Education: The Case of Lei 10.639/03 in Brazilian Education
Site: Brazil
Otavio Barros is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Policy Studies. Drawing on critical theories, his research examines how students, educators, and communities navigate and make sense of racial equity educational policies and reforms in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. In summer 2026, Barros will work closely with educators in the Northeast of Brazil to examine how racial equity policies are mediated through enactment and interpretation in school contexts and how these processes organize social relations and racial meanings in Brazil.
Pragya Mittal
Project: Workplace Composition and Career Outcomes in the Indian Administrative Service
Site: India
Pragya Mittal is a PhD student in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics. Her research interests span development and labor economics, with a focus on how different dimensions of identity and institutional design shape individual outcomes and broader societal development.
In summer 2026, she will examine how social composition in the workplace shapes careers and performance in the public sector, using archival records, machine learning, and original data collection. Mittal will travel to India this summer to conduct interviews and surveys with public workers across multiple cities.
Yadhav Deerpaul
Project: Environmental Histories and the Cold War in the Indian Ocean
Site: UK
Yadhav Deerpaul is a PhD student in the Department of History. He is working towards a joint PhD in History and the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology with a minor in African Studies. Deerpaul’s doctoral dissertation is on the colonial and postcolonial history of small islands on the east coast of Africa.