Student Fellows

EUC JEAN MONNET GRADUATE FELLOWSHIP

Jean Monnet Fellows are among the best University of Michigan graduate students who focus on Europe in their research. Student grantees receive summer grants to work on issues of European integration, and are expected to conduct research and write a paper resulting from this research on a relevant topic of their choosing. Jean Monnet Fellows are active participants in European Union Center activities, often taking part in outreach activities for local high schools, colleges, and universities.

This stipend is made possible by the Center for European Studies-European Union Center, a grant from the European Commission, and funding from the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies.

2009 JEAN MONNET FELLOWS

ELA GEZEN is a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. In her dissertation she engages in a comparative analysis of Turkish-German literature and music focusing on the representations of Berlin. Working at the intersection of German studies, cultural studies, musicology, cultural geography, and minority studies, she examines how Berlin is experienced and remembered, sounded and read by Turkish-German writers and musicians-how they represent, imagine and narrate the spaces of Berlin. Central to her analysis are the interventions by Turkish-German artists, who have placed the migratory experience as integral to Germany's history and culture.

MONICA LOPEZ-LERMA is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and a graduate student in the Certificate of the Screen, Arts, and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Originally from Spain, she received a Law degree from the University of Valencia and a LL.M from the European Academy of Legal Theory of Brussels, Belgium. Her dissertation examines Spanish contemporary novels, films, and legal texts that reflect on the changing relation between ethics, politics, and law in the global age.

JENNIFER MILLER is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on European center-right party strategies toward visible minorities, and, more specifically, the effect of such strategies on national identity.

JESSICA ROBBINS is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.  Her research interests include aging, medical anthropology, kinship, memory, and postsocialism.  Her current ethnographic research in Wroclaw and Poznan, Poland, investigates connections between transformations in elderly personhood and changing national and state formations through the study of contemporary practices of memory.  Her research seeks to understand the social creation and unmaking of aging persons that can occur through changes in memory in personal, familial, and national contexts.

2008 JEAN MONNET FELLOWS

KENICHI ARIGA  is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on empirical analyses of mandate, accountability, and representation in the elections of national parliaments in advanced industrial democracies as well as the elections of the European Parliament in member countries.

AVRAHAM ASTOR is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan.  His research focuses on relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Spain, with a specific focus on the causes of regional variation in responses to mosque establishment.   Before attending Michigan, he received his BA in Philosophy from Brown University and was a pre-doctoral fellow in the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.

CHARLES DORIEAN is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how national-level political context affects the vote for Euroskeptic parties in European Parliament elections. More generally, Charles is interested in the role that political parties can play in facilitating representation and accountability in democratic societies, through structuring individual behavior and preference formation within elections and legislatures.

ALEXANDRA GERBER is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her interests include gender, European integration, and national sovereignty in post-socialist space. She is currently a Fulbright Fellow conducting fieldwork in Poland, where she is investigating how European integration and supranationalism impact discourses of gender and nation. Alexandra published "The Letter versus The Spirit: Barriers to Meaningful Implementation of Gender Equality Policy in Poland" in Women's Studies International Forum special issue dedicated to Eastern European women's encounter with the European Union (forthcoming).

EMANUELA GRAMA is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. Her dissertation examines the political and social dimensions of "heritage" development in contemporary Romania by focusing on two major projects of built heritage rehabilitation: 1) the re-making of the historical center of Sibiu, a lieux-de-mémoire of Transylvania's German minority and 2) the Bánffy castle in Bontida (once known as the "Versailles of Transylvania"). The study she will undertake as a Jean Monnet fellow will help her set the ethnographic research in Romania in a larger context, by identifying the processes underlying the making of a cultural "new Europe" in a marginal location on the EU-map. Before engaging in her dissertation research, she had also published "Work, State, and the Linguistic Construction of 'Self' in Romania of the 1950s and 1960s. A Case Study." (2006) and "Networking Texts and Persons: Politics of Plagiarism in Postsocialist Romania" (2004), both in the Romanian Journal of Society and Politics.

RAQUEL VEGA-DURAN is a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures. Raquel received her B.A. in Anglo-American Studies from the University of Seville, Spain, and a Graduate Certificate in Film Studies from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the ways in which contemporary Spanish literary and visual narratives, understood as both artistic texts and social documents, are shaping discussions of immigration in Spain.  Drawing on theories of power, border, identity, and nation she examines the ways in which Spanish fiction, film, and documentary photography contribute to the construction of the social imaginary of "undocumented" North African and Caribbean immigrants in Spain, and analyzes conceptions of the Spanish nation and, by extension, Europe that emerge from the encounter with the immigrant.

2007 JEAN MONNET FELLOWS

VANESSA ABBALLE-BOLORE a student at the University of Michigan Law School LL.M. program. Her research interests include research on the federal implications of the building of an area of justice within the European Union from a comparative point of view with American federalism.

GUNTRA AISTARS is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment. Her dissertation research on the development of organic agriculture movements in Latvia and Costa Rica explores differences in the opportunities and challenges presented for organic agriculture under diverse cultural, historical and ecological conditions. She has worked closely with the Latvian Organic Agriculture Association and the Costa Rican Organic Agriculture Movement to understand how organic farmers in both countries are experiencing, and how each movement is responding to, very different types of regionalization and globalization brought about by EU accession (Latvia) and potential membership in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (Costa Rica).

HEIN BOGAARD is a PhD candidate in International Business and Business Economics at the Ross School of Business. His research focuses on the development of the banking industry in the transition economies of Eastern Europe, particularly the impact of entry of foreign, mostly Western European, banks. Before coming to the University of Michigan, he worked on private sector development in developing countries for the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, World Bank in Washington, DC, and Netherlands Ministry of Finance. He holds a Master's degree in Economics from Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

JENNIFER MILLER is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Michigan and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. Her research focuses on the role of institutions on the formation of collective identity, Euroskepticism, and race and ethnicity. She has presented her work at the American Political Science Association annual meeting and the European Union Studies Association international meeting. Her work on the EU is inspired by her experiences living in Spain and France.

MINAYO NASIALI, a PhD candidate in Modern European History at the University of Michigan, studies immigration, citizenship and the welfare state in France. She will move to France this fall to begin research on her dissertation, focusing on local democracy, public housing allocation, and immigrant political movements in the southern port city of Marseille. Originally from southern California, she moved to the Bay area to attend Stanford University before beginning her graduate work in Michigan.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LAW SCHOOL JEAN MONNET RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

The U-M Law School welcomes Jean Monnet Research Fellows, who spend six months in residence at the Law School conducting research and writing a publishable paper on European integration. Jean Monnet Research Fellows are professors of law and scholars with backgrounds in law-related fields who research legal issues of European integration. The Fellowship is made possible through the generosity of the Milton and Miriam Handler Foundation and is coordinated by Professor Daniel Halberstam at the U-M Law School in conjunction with the European Union Center.