We are excited to share that two of our Global Studies PhD graduate students--Brett Aho and Mariah Miller--are recipients of the 2021-2022 Mendell Graduate Fellowship competition. Since 2006, the Steve and Barbara Mendell Graduate Fellowship in Cultural Literacy has supported outstanding UCSB graduate students whose research advances the goals of cultural literacy and ethics in public life. The fellowship is organized by the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Brett Aho (Department of Global Studies), Towards a More Ethical AI Capitalism: Data Governance in Germany

 Mariah Miller (Department of Global Studies), Social Enterprises in Three Institutional Systems: Comparing China, Spain, and the USA

This year’s awardees also include graduate students from all across campus:

 Nicole de Silva (Department of History), From Homemaking to Peacemaking: Women’s International Organizing and the Practice of Consumer Diplomacy, 1918-1945

 Olga Faccani (Department of Classics), Rising from the Ashes of Troy: The Trojan Women Project

 Amy Fallas (Department of History), The Gospel of Wealth: Charity and the Making of Modern Egypt, 1879-1939

 Janna Haider and Emma John (Department of History), ‘Educating and Americanizing the Foreigner’: The Daughters of the American Revolution and Immigration Policy in the Early Twentieth Century

 Benjamin Jameson-Ellsmore (Department of History of Art and Architecture), Hackerspace and Urban Life: Architecture, Infrastructure, and Citizenship in the Twenty-first Century

 Julie Johnson (Department of History), Commodifying Contraception: A Political Economy of Sex in Interwar Britain

 Kendall Ota (Department of Sociology), Relocating Risk: Cruising the Korean Spa in Los Angeles and South Korea

 Cierra Sorin (Department of Sociology), Epistemologies of Consent in BDSM Communities

 Morgane Thonnart (Department of Religious Studies), Community, Authority, and Identity through Halal Comedy: A Comic Imagery/Imaginary of American Islam

 Anna Wald (Department of Feminist Studies), Digital Disidentifications: Affective Circuits of Meme Exchange, Viral Counterpublics, and Queer Ironic Consumption

 Teng (Jason) Xu (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies), Love the Nation, Love the People: Aesthetics of Chinese Nationalism in the Xi Jinping Era

 Xiuhe Zhang (Department of Film and Media Studies), A Taste of Rust: Abandonment, Migration, and Competing Imaginations of the Northeast in Post-Reform China

Congrats, all!