2025 Janco Travel Grant Recipients Announced

By Audrey Weckwerth

Established in 2005, the Agnes and Nathan Janco Travel Award supports dissertation research-related travel by SSD doctoral students who have a specific research goal critical to their dissertations. Three students were selected by a faculty review committee to receive this year’s awards: 

Alyssa Mendez, a Ph.D. student in Anthropology, will use the grant to continue her ethnographic fieldwork in Greece. Her dissertation, Wind Resistance: Contesting Post-Carbon Futures in Post-Crisis Greece, explores how activists and communities in the Agrafa mountains are challenging the dominant narratives of renewable energy development and reimagining ecological ethics in the shadow of climate crisis and debt. With support from the Janco Grant, Alyssa will conduct participant-observation with civil society groups, attend court hearings on energy infrastructure projects, and consult archival materials in Athens and surrounding regions.

Moksha Sharma, a Ph.D. student in Political Science, is investigating the lesser-studied effects of colonization on the colonial state itself. Her project, Alibis of Colonialism: How the Colonisation of India Shaped the British Empire, traces how Britain’s imperial ventures in India shaped domestic political coalitions—particularly between England and Scotland—through patronage networks tied to colonial employment. The Janco Grant will allow Moksha to conduct archival research at the British Library, the National Archives in London, and the National Library of Scotland to examine parliamentary records, East India Company correspondence, and elite social networks.

Alexander Weinberg, a Ph.D. student in Economics, is studying the long-term effects of 1960s civil unrest on neighborhood disinvestment in American cities. His project, Urban Scars: The Persistent Effects of 1960s Civil Unrest, analyzes business directories, local newspapers, and public records to document commercial decline in neighborhoods affected by uprisings. With support from the Janco Grant, Alexander will travel to Los Angeles and New York to digitize business and telephone directories from the 1960s and 70s, expanding his analysis beyond Chicago to understand broader urban inequality patterns across U.S. cities.

Each recipient will receive $3,000 to support their summer dissertation research.

The Agnes and Nathan Janco Travel Grant is made possible by a gift from Joel Janco in honor of Agnes and Nathan Janco in recognition of their love of travel and exploration, their compassion for others, and their implacable dedication to science and the arts. 

Ruth Bloch Rubin, Assistant Professor of Political Science; Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Associate Professor of History; Greg Kaplan, Professor of Economics; Alan Kolata, Professor of Anthropology; and Geoffrey Wodtke, Professor of Sociology, served on this year’s committee.