HPE Project Summer Research Grantees

Project: Real Estate Capital: The Political Economy and Financialization of Beirut’s Urban Space, 1943-1975

Bio: Jan Altaner is a PhD student in History at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Located at the intersection of social, economic, urban, and global history, his dissertation explores the political economy of urban space in twentieth-century Lebanon.

Project: Bonds of Catastrophe

Bio: Bench Ansfield is assistant professor of history at Temple University and author of Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (W. W. Norton, forthcoming August 2025). Their second book, Bonds of Catastrophe, examines how the global property insurance industry is weathering the growing risks of climate collapse.

Project: Neoliberal Siege: How Sanctions Reshaped Power and Politics of Legitimacy in Saddam’s Iraq

Bio: Chloe Bernadaux is a PhD student in Political Science at Northwestern University. Her research examines authoritarian politics and political economy in the Middle East. Her current work focuses on how international sanctions affect regime strategies of legitimation and elite power structures under conditions of external pressure.

Project: “People's Sanctions”: Non-state Actors and Financial Markets in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1977-1987

Bio: Flavia Canestrini is a postdoctoral fellow at LUISS University in Rome, Italy. She holds a PhD in History from Sciences Po, Paris, France. Her research explores the use of economic and financial sanctions in global markets during the late-twentieth century, with a particular focus on the United States.

Project: The Lure of “Small”: The Rise of the Tech-Entrepreneur in Bangalore, 1960-2000s

Bio: Aditi Dey is a PhD candidate in Politics at the New School for Social Research. Her dissertation examines the mid-twentieth-century history of industrialization during the era of decolonization in India, and the politics of technological work. Her research focuses on the city of Bangalore, tracing its emergence as the ‘Silicon Valley’ of India.

Project: How Management Made Medicine: The Evolution of “Quality Improvement” from Industrial Production to Medical AI

Bio: Zach Griffen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Previously, he received his PhD in Sociology from UCLA. His project traces how mid-twentieth-century management science ideas about ‘quality improvement’ in industrial production have shaped the modern U.S. healthcare system.

Project: Reading Trade History from Paris and Geneva: Political Contestation and the Legacy of Interwar Protectionism at the WTO and OECD

Bio: Edward Knudsen is a doctoral researcher in international relations at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the political economy and economic history of the United States and Europe in the 20th century, specifically how the historical memories of interwar economic events have been constructed and deployed in contemporary debates.

Project: WiFi Neoliberalism: Wireless Networking’s Technical Undermining of the State, 1979-2012

Bio: Charli Muller is a PhD candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and an instructor at the New School. Her dissertation follows 20th-century debates over how to divvy up two internationally shared resources necessary for global wireless communication: orbital space for satellites and electromagnetic spectrum. She has published on the history and political economy of communication technology in Logic(s) Magazine, Monde(s) Histoire, Espaces, Relations, and tripleC.

Project: The Development Leviathan: Good Governance and the Remaking of Global Political Authority, 1989-2005

Bio: Connor O’Brien is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His dissertation explores the conceptual history of good governance and its relationship to the broader struggle between humanitarian, human rights, and development practitioners over the foundations of global political authority. Connor is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Project: The Birth of Biopolitics in Underdevelopment: Human Capital, Agriculture, and Fertility

Bio: Hengameh “Henny” Ziai received her PhD in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University and is now Assistant Professor in the Department of History at SOAS, University of London. She researches the genealogical origins of human capital theory in debates on agriculture, development, and decolonization, with particular focus on Chicago school economist, Theodore W. Schultz, and the impact of his thought on World Bank policy in Sudan.

Project: The Business Republic: Debates, Arguments, and Projects of a Neoliberal Economic Governance Program in Mexico, 1945-1994

Bio: José Antonio Galindo Domínguez is a PhD student in History at El Colegio de México. His research explores the evolution of economic governance ideas and projects promoted by Mexican business groups during the latter half of the 20th century. He emphasizes the pivotal role of Mexican business leaders in advancing North American regional economic integration.

Project: Disassembling the State: The Techno-Politics of Privatization and Public Banking in Colombia

Bio: Julián Gómez-Delgado is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. His dissertation explores the technopolitics of privatization and the demise of ‘public goods’ in Colombia. It studies the assemblage and unraveling of banking and telecommunication infrastructures. He also writes about politics and social protests in Latin America.

Project: Developing Entrepreneurs: Small Business and the Making of Neoliberalism in the United States

Bio: Jeremy Goodwin is a PhD candidate in the department of history at Cornell University, where his research focuses on the intellectual and political history of capitalism in the twentieth-century United States. His dissertation traces evolving ideas about entrepreneurship, small business, and economic development from the 1950s through the 1990s.

Project: Agents of Economic Justice: Anti-colonial Nationalists, Consumer-activists, and EU Bureaucrats

Bio: Roxanne S. Houman (she/her) is a PhD student in Modern European history from Columbia University in New York. Her doctoral thesis takes a pan-European perspective on the alternative trade networks created by consumer-activists between 1957 and 1992, particularly those in the fair trade and anti-sweatshop movements.

Project: Cooperative Infrastructures

Bio: Eve O'Connor is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation is an intellectual history of the cooperative movement in the twentieth-century United States.

Project: How the IMF Helped to Dismantle the Franco Regime: International Finance, the 1978 IMF Stand-By Arrangement, and the Moncloa Pacts in the aftermath of the first oil shock, 1973-1979

Bio: Asensio Robles is a historian of globalization and the Cold War. He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in 2024, after completing a thesis on Western multilateralism, the 1970s economic crisis, and their impact on Spain’s democratic transition. He is currently an adjunct professor at Comillas Pontifical University.

Project: Imperialism and the Politics of Logistics: Transimperial Rivalry and Labor Militancy at the Ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki

Bio: Eylem Taylan is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation research explores life, labor, and contentious politics at the port of Piraeus (Greece) after its acqusition by Chinese state capital in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Project: Sufficient for What? Tracing the Evolution of Thailand’s Sufficiency Economy between Austerity, Neoliberalism, and State Developmentalism

Bio: Aila Trasi is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, studying International Organizations and Political Economy. Her dissertation project investigates the mechanisms through which the IMF and World Bank influence developmental projects in Southeast Asia and reshape the boundaries and relationship between the state and economy.

Project: Exile, Nationalization, and Finance: Challenging Mobutu in the Congolese Diaspora

Bio: Peter Vale received his PhD in African History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023. His manuscript in progress, ‘The Copper Eaters’: Inventing Capitalism in Central Africa explores how Central African citizens, subjects, and political leaders navigated the tensions between their historical relationships to natural resources, their reliance on foreign capital, and their desires for political sovereignty.

Project: The Independence of Djibouti

Bio: Joel van de Sande is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. His interests include oral history, political economy, and political and social theory. His research focuses on Djibouti.

Project: Floating Zones: The Neoliberal Renovation of the Law of the Ship

Bio: Stefan Yong is a PhD candidate in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests are in maritime economic geography, critical logistics, and the politics of scale. His dissertation research explores crises of overproduction in global shipping and the postwar political economy of the megaship.

Project: Non-Discrimination: Family, Social Policy, and the Welfare State in the European Community, 1975-1992

Bio: Roslyn Dubler is a political and intellectual historian of modern Europe, currently completing her doctorate at Columbia University. Her dissertation, a comparative history of social policy in Britain, France, and West Germany, examines how European efforts to ensure “non-discrimination on the basis of sex” collided with national welfare reform in the late twentieth century.

Project: Community Conflict in an Innovative City: Institutions and Neoliberal Urban Development in the Boston Region

Bio: Julian B. Hartman is an Active Learning Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. His research examines urban development in the Boston region, tracing how university and medical institutions, entrepreneurial urbanism, and persistent racial inequality interacted to shape Boston's emergence as a global city in the past 75 years. In 2023, he received his PhD from the University of Arizona's School of Geography, Development, and Environment.

Project: The Political Economy of Decolonization: Radicalism and Bauxite Extraction in Guinea, 1950-1984

Bio: Chris Abdul Hakim Martinez is a PhD student in history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research is located at the intersection of histories of decolonization and development in 20th century West Africa. His dissertation explores the history and political economy of extractive industries, industrial development, monetary sovereignty, and radical Pan-Africanism in post-independence Guinée Conakry (1958-1984).

Project: From Collaboration to Conflict: State-Business Relations in Mexico, 1946-1985

Bio: Jay Pan is a PhD candidate in Latin American History at Columbia University. His interests include the history of industrial policy, finance, and the labor movement in Latin America. His dissertation research focuses on the political economy of state-business relations in 20th century Mexico.

Project: Capturing Public Value: A Genealogy of Neoliberal Approaches to Land Value Capture Instruments in Colombia

Bio: Isabel Peñaranda Currie is a PhD student in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation explores the technopolitics of land value in Latin America and how it can be claimed for redistributive public agendas. She is also the host of Sur-Urbano, a podcast about Latin American cities

Project: The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations, 1960-1990

Bio: Jian Ren is a History PhD candidate at Rutgers University. He is writing a history of ideas in China-Latin America relations during the Cold War period, examining Chinese policy makers’ views on Latin American markets and economic developments.

Project: Dispossessing Land While Owning It: Palm Oil Smallholders and Indonesia’s Agrarian Roots of Neoliberalism

Bio: Perdana “Pepe” Roswaldy is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University and an Arryman Scholar in the Equality Development and Globalization Studies at the Buffett Institute. Their research focuses on Indonesia’s history of palm oil expansion and plantation economy. They also write extensively on gender justice and land conflict.

Project: The Commonplace of the Commons: Tragedy and Sexuality in American Legal and Economic Thought

Bio: E.T. Stone is a PhD candidate in Harvard University's Program on American Studies. Her research uses approaches in legal history and theory to explore how private law creates the conditions of possibility for freedom, injury, and care in the United States.

Project: Ides of Marx: The Embrace of Neoliberalism by Polish Dissidents, 1980-2007

Bio: Miłosz Wiatrowski-Bujacz is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University. His research focuses primarily on the intellectual genealogy of “the shock therapy” – the program of neoliberal economic reforms that radically reshaped Poland’s political economy in the post-1989 era.

Project: Modelling Self-Adjustment: Contesting Neoliberalism in Burkinabè and Ghanaian Universities, 1980s-1990s

Bio: Thomas Zuber is a historian of West Africa. He obtained his PhD from Columbia University in 2023. His research explores the histories of inequality and food security in twentieth-century Burkina Faso and the Sahel.

Project: From “Model Pupils” to Model State: Estonian Economists and the Globalization of the (Post)Socialist World

Bio: Kevin Axe is a PhD candidate at the Free University of Berlin and researcher within Berlin's "Contestations of the Liberal Script" (SCRIPTS) Cluster of Excellence. His research is focused on the spread of neoliberal economic thought within the (post)socialist world.

Project: Waves of Neoliberalism: Revisiting the Authoritarian Capitalism in South America

Bio: César Castillo-García is a PhD student of economics at the New School for Social Research. He researches the history of neoliberalism, income inequality, and the economics of precarious work. His dissertation explores how transnational intellectual networks have framed economic development and incepted neoliberal common sense in Peru since the 1940s.

Project: How is the Welfare State Possible under Neoliberalism? Uneven Neoliberalization in Taiwan and South Korea

Bio: Terrence Chen is a PhD student in sociology at NYU. He is interested in studying the expansion of the welfare state in the era of neoliberalism, with a regional focus in East Asia. His other research investigates the political contexts of digital democracy, which resulted in a paper published in Third World Quarterly.

Project: The Political Conditions of the Market: Alsogaray, Hayek, and the Problem of Dictatorship in Argentine Neoliberalism

Bio: Matilde Ciolli is completing her PhD in History of Political Thought at the University of Milan and at EHESS in Paris, with a dissertation titled “The Conservative Moment of Neoliberalism: Family, community and tradition in the hierarchical neoliberal society.” Since 2018, she has been part of the Group d’Etudes sur les Néolibéralisme et ses Alternatives, coordinated by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval.

Project: Making of the Central Bank of Georgia in the 1990s: Tracing the Roots of Neoliberalism in a Transition State

Bio: Dr. Ia Eradze is a researcher at the Ilia State University and a fellow in the research network Legacies of Communism, initiated by the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. Her area of research is political economy and historical evolution of finance in the post-socialist space.

Project: Automation as an Intellectual Event: Automata, Work, and Politics in Cold War West Germany, 1969-1989

Bio: Jonas Knatz is a PhD candidate in modern European history at NYU. He is writing a conceptual history of work in Cold War West Germany, arguing that the automation of labor constituted an intellectual event in which philosophers, sociologists, politicians, and engineers rethought the ontological, epistemic, and normative grounds of their respective fields.

Project: Legalized Scarcity: A History of the Political Economy of Power, Electricity, and Water in South Africa, 1910-2007

Bio: Ntombizodwa Mpofu is a History PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her research, titled “Legalized scarcity: A history of the political economy of power, electricity and water in South Africa 1910-2007,” asks why and how it has been difficult to correct the historically unequal distribution of water in South Africa. Her work argues that scarcity is a product of the colonial project, the apartheid project, and the post-apartheid state’s modernization projects.

Project: Following "Shock Therapy" from La Paz to Warsaw during the Long 1980s

Bio: Eva-Maria Muschik is a historian and Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022) and will examine austerity politics and protests in the long 1980s in her new research project.

Project: Our NHS: Welfare Nationalism and the Survival of Social Democracy

Bio: Andrew Seaton is the Plumer Junior Research Fellow in History at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. He is a political and social historian of modern Britain, working on topics in the history of science, medicine, and the environment. His first book, on the history of the National Health Service (NHS), was published in 2023 by Yale University Press.

Project: Wealth is in the Soil: Decolonization and the Reinvention of International Development in Malawi

Bio: Geoffrey Traugh is a Harper-Schmidt fellow and a collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a manuscript, Wealth is in the Soil: Decolonization and the Reinvention of International Development in Malawi, which examines how and why development went rural in post-colonial Africa.