Kellogg Dissertation Year Fellow Hannah Early Bagdanov has been awarded the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Award in Social Sciences for the 2025–2026 academic year, the most prestigious award that Notre Dame has to offer to graduating doctoral students, the Graduate School at the University of Notre Dame announced today. She will be formally recognized for this achievement with winners of other awards at the Graduate School Commencement Ceremony to be held at Notre Dame Stadium on May 16.
Early Bagdanov is a political scientist and an emerging leader in the study of conflict, political violence, and state and non-state governance. For her dissertation, she designed an ambitious mixed-methods study grounded in 14 months of extensive fieldwork in East Jerusalem, examining how Palestinian residents in the city navigate everyday interactions with the Israeli state. The Kellogg Institute helped support this research through two Graduate Research Grants that brought her to the area for fieldwork. Before defending her dissertation, she published one of its chapters as a stand-alone solo article in the American Political Science Review, the field’s flagship journal.
Including her Kellogg Dissertation Year Fellowship and a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the American Political Science Association, Early Bagdanov was awarded more than $50,000 in total funding for her dissertation.
This story was excerpted from a larger article originally published at graduateschool.nd.edu.