Kellogg Institute Doctoral Student Affiliate Mary Shiraef has won a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellowship, which provides opportunities to doctoral candidates to engage in dissertation research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies. The program is designed to contribute to the development and improvement of the study of modern foreign languages and area studies in the United States.
The fellowship will enable Shiraef to finish processing the data she gathered last year in Albania through a research grant from the Kellogg Institute. Titled "The Authoritarian Legacy of Multiethnic Regime Engineering in Albania: a Preparation Trip to Add a Control Group in Greece," the project covered minority group identities in southern Albania for the timeline 1930-1974.
Shiraef will additionally to extend her data collection across the Albania-Greece border to include data for the same time period on a sample of villages in northern Greece.
"The border was closed in 1945, which allows me to compare these populations in examination of the impact of communist identity engineering policies on intergenerational ethnic and political identities," she explains.
Shiraef has received multiple professionalization and conference travel grants from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies in addition to her travel grant. She is a PhD candidate in political science specializing in comparative authoritarianism, national identity politics, and post-communism. Her work examines identity transmission, with a focus on collective memory, immigration, and sites of memorialization during and after periods of communist, authoritarian rule.
The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, is an interdisciplinary community of scholars and students from across the University and around the globe that promotes research, provides educational opportunities, and builds partnerships throughout the world on the themes of global democracy and integral human development.