Student Programs

Graduate Student Associates / Job Market Paper & Dissertation Abstracts

The Graduate Student Associates (GSA) program is one of the Center's oldest and most valued programs. Directed by Erez Manela, professor of history and Weatherhead Center acting director (2025–2026), the program supports approximately twenty-four doctoral candidates from advanced degree programs. Many GSAs will be on the job market soon, and/or are preparing to defend their dissertation. Below we share synopses of the innovative research these rising scholars are working on.

Sandra Georges El Hadi

PhD Candidate, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Multilingualism and Malleability of Verbal Abilities: Parents’ Practices and Beliefs About Learning Two Languages in Early Childhood

This study examines how parents’ beliefs about their children’s verbal abilities are related to their language-related practices at home. Data from families raising multilingual children shows that parents who view their children's verbal abilities as more malleable—rather than "fixed"—are more likely to report reading to their children in their second language. By uncovering how parental mindsets influence home learning practices, this work highlights an important lever for improving home language environments and supporting children's multilingual development.

Gangsim Eom

PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.

Foreign Gaze: Cemeteries as Windows into Trans-Oceanic Migration to Indonesia

This dissertation examines how the experiences of Korean migrants, within and across generations, signal a deeper shift in the very meaning of “the foreign” in Indonesia. Centering on the concepts of “the foreign” and “foreign gaze” in diverse social and historical contexts, it highlights overlooked dimensions of otherness, relatedness, and identity that transcend delimiting categories such as nation, race, and ethnicity. This paper traces the origins of Korean migration to Indonesia, when approximately 1,400 colonized Koreans were dispatched by the Japanese Empire as soldiers and forced laborers to colonize more distant and foreign “others.” Through an analysis of two cemeteries and two cases of the afterlives of these laborers, the paper reveals how the shared colonial past of Korea and Indonesia under Japanese rule (1942–1945) remains intimately entangled with their postcolonial presents.

Sujin Elisa Han

PhD Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University.

Health in the Market: A History of Supplements in Modern Korea, 1896–1963

What did being “healthy” look and feel like for Koreans during the first half of the twentieth century—a period of rapid yet compressed changes in geopolitics and society, medicine and economy? To answer this question, this dissertation offers a history of health supplements, starting in the 1890s during the late Chosŏn Dynasty and ending in South Korea in the 1960s. The project demonstrates how the supplement market that grew between the 1890s and 1953 developed into a space where pharmaceutical companies, consumers, chemists, doctors, and bureaucrats coproduced scripts, images, and notions about health that proliferated after the Korean War (1950–1953). These formed commercial models of health. They embodied socio-medical desires and anxieties in postwar South Korea and reflected tensions between medico-scientific expertise and commercial pursuits. By bringing social and economic history together with medical and pharmaceutical history, "Health in the Market" complements and challenges existing explanations focused on state and medical professionals’ agendas to move toward a more multidimensional understanding of health’s historical construction in modern Korea.

Seokweon Jeon

PhD Candidate, Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University.

Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies: American Liberal Protestants, US Immigration Policymaking, and Un/Making of the Asian Exclusion Era, 1875–1924

Immigration restrictions in the United States did not begin with walls, quotas, or inspection stations. Borders were first drawn in imagination and belief—through pulpits, popular literature, missionary tracts, and reform platforms where anxieties crystallized and ideas of national belonging took shape. "Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies" offers a religious and discursive history of how immigration and citizenship restrictions developed between 1875 and 1924, showing how liberal Protestant leaders, organizations, and ideas helped define the moral and cultural foundations of early US immigration law. Drawing on sermons, speeches, missionary publications, periodicals, congressional records, and Asian American writings, this dissertation demonstrates that immigration control emerged not only from policy debates but from broader moral arguments about race, civilization, and national character. By tracing how these religious ideas influenced lawmaking and public opinion, the project explains why immigration policy in the United States has long carried moral authority and continues to link questions of security and belonging to deeper struggles over national identity.

Michael Zanger-Tishler

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, Harvard University and Program in Social Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.

State Data and the Production of Quantitative Knowledge: The Case of Police Stops in the United States and France

This study focuses on the production of quantitative knowledge regarding race and police stops in the United States and France. It finds that in the United States, the widespread access to police stop microdata has influenced policy and generated extensive research but has limited the questions researchers ask to those easily answerable in the data. By contrast, the lack of administrative stop data in France has led external actors to generate their own data via surveys and observations. While this has in some ways hampered research on police stops, it has empowered nonpolice actors to gain credibility producing quantitative knowledge about topics like national origin and ethnoracial identity that are typically invisible in official French data.

Sophia Zervas

PhD Candidate, Department of Music, Harvard University.

At a Utopic Crossroads: Ankara Music and Fine Arts University

Unlike Islamist movements in neighboring countries that prohibit musical activity, Turkey’s conservative government has shown keen interest in developing music education as a channel through which to articulate national identity. This paper investigates cultural and educational policies of Turkey’s incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) through a case study of Ankara Music and Fine Arts University. This institution was opened at the behest of President Erdoğan to address perceived deficiencies in the education of “national music.” Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted at the university, this paper analyzes its innovative approach to music education, which seeks to implement non-Eurocentric, decolonized educational methods. Although left-wing movements have traditionally used decolonial arguments to defend decentering Western educational strategies and logic in the classroom, the cultural field in Turkey reveals that its right-wing government has adopted similar rhetoric to frame Turkey as leader of the Global South in staking out an alternative modernity apart from the West. The paper contextualizes this institution within the broader scope of educational policy under Erdoğan, arguing that its opening exemplifies the state’s approach to higher education: the creation and proliferation of parallel institutions to rival existing ones.