Announcing the 2026-27 Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph Field Research Grant Fellows

CISSR is pleased to announce the 2026-27 Lloyd & Susanne Rudolph Field Research Fellows. These sixteen students and their projects continue the legacy of field work research pioneered by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, exemplifying the variety of geographic, disciplinary, and methodological strengths from across the Social Sciences Division. 

Their projects examine a wide range of topics, including educational inequality in China; informal labor markets and economic reform; kinship and language development; historical and contemporary state-building; climate adaptation and environmental politics; and urban planning, migration, and religious nationalism, among others. 

These awards cover expenses associated with original fieldwork, archival research, and more, deepening understanding and improving research. CISSR is proud to support the future of social scientific research at the University of Chicago and beyond. 

We invite you to read more about the field research fellows and their projects:

Theo Knights (History)

"Rethinking Provisionism: Customs Disputes and the Making of Ottoman Economic Policy "

This project examines Ottoman bureaucrats’ substantive debates and experimentation with customs administration and taxation in the 17th century, challenging assumptions that Ottoman economic policy was characterized by 300 years of stasis and adherence to the principle of provisionism. Provisionist accounts suggest that between 1500 and 1800, Ottoman policy prioritized providing its subjects with a steady and plentiful supply of goods, which were to be cheap and of good quality, and thus adopted a highly interventionist approach to production and trade. This paradigm has proved central to accounts of Ottoman economic decline and long flattened our understanding of its internal politics. By expanding our conception of who could legitimately pursue policy decisions on behalf of the Ottoman state, I take seriously the individuals responsible for implementing the state’s economic policy on the ground in the Empire’s customs houses—tax farmers, treasurers, judges, and governors—as potential economic policymakers. I demonstrate how recurring disputes between merchants and these officials, over purportedly deviant customs rates, resulted in debate, renewed negotiation, and even reversal of existing economic policies by the provincial and central government. In parallel, I trace the web of material interests that tied these lesser Ottoman officials, as well as the merchants they interacted with, to elites at the center of governance, to identify previously overlooked political coalitions operating within the Ottoman state that may help explain its policy decisions. By bringing into focus political coalitions organized around shared economic interests, this project will reveal the range of competing political economic logics developing within the Ottoman Empire, offering a new narrative of the transition to capitalism in Ottoman lands.  

Zachariah Sippy (History)

"No Religion but their Self-Interest: Mercantile Loyalty During the Spanish Imperial Crisis"

Observing the actions of merchants during the British invasions of Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1806-7, Argentine-founding father Manuel Belgrano lamented that the merchant "knows no other country, no other king, nor any other religion than his own self-interest." This project takes Belgrano's complaint as a starting point to examine the divergent political allegiances of merchant communities across the late Spanish Atlantic. During the collapse of the empire, “self-interest” drove some merchant factions to actively support revolution, while others financed royalist campaigns. This research investigates the underlying social and economic networks to understand how a merchant's position within the colonial commercial order dictated their political alignment. Utilizing consulado, notarial, commercial litigation, and imperial administrative records, the project hopes to map the internal structure of the colonial order of corporate privilege and the conflicts it generated. The Rudolph Field Research fellowship will support research to be conducted at the Archive of the Indies in Seville, the General Archive of Simancas (Archive of the Old Regime), and the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. 

Anwar Omeish (Political Science)

"Genres of the Law: Theorizing Legal Authority and Political Power in the 19th Century Mediterranean"

This project investigates how Islamic jurists in early nineteenth-century North Africa theorized the relationship between legal authority and political power during a period of profound institutional transformation. Historically, this project asks how these scholars theoretically confronted European state centralization, expanding imperial incursions into a recentralizing Ottoman empire, transformations in commerce and flows of capital, and the emergence of new international legal regimes backed by armed force—developments that reshaped the institutional environment through which law operated. Conceptually, this project examines how these Islamic jurists complicate modern assumptions about the unitary relationship between law and the state, contributing an important non-Western perspective to growing scholarly debates about the theory and practice of legal pluralisms. Methodologically, this project advances a new mode of reading Islamic legal texts as works of political thought by attending to Islamic legal genres as indices of a distinct institutional stance through which jurists articulate their relationship to legal authority and political power. Drawing on print and manuscript sources generated by jurists in the early nineteenth century, this project ultimately seeks to illuminate nineteenth-century North African Islamic conceptualizations of the relationship between law and the state—and, in doing so, to contribute to answering questions about legal authority and political power that continue to animate political life today. 

Yuting Chen (Sociology)

"Shipbuilding and the Remaking of Chinese Industrial Order, 1949-2008 "

This project argues that there is an overlooked dimension to China’s transition to the market economy—the internal reforms of state-owned enterprises. This project asks, "what does it mean to initiate and sustain a post-Fordist reform, and under what conditions do such projects of techno-political change fail or succeed? My hypothesis is that the Chinese shipbuilders inadvertently developed a home-grown mode of just-in-time production at the core of the command economy. Analytically, the project takes a hybrid approach of two steps. The first step is to reconstruct basic criteria for a successful post-Fordist reform. It asks what the techno-political project of a post-Fordist reform entails, what would be required for its success, and in what way Chinese shipbuilders succeeded in meeting these requirements. To this end, I engage in a conceptual analysis of the technical history of particular manufacturing systems in specific contexts. The second step, then, seeks to reconstruct the reasons why shipbuilders made decisions that led to the discovery of the discrepancy between the Fordist hierarchy and lived reality. Here, I switch to a more classically sociological analysis and reconstruct the epistemic, organizational, and ideological conditions of internal reform on the basis of expert interviews and archival materials.  

Yuqing Huang (Sociology)

"How Hospitals and Physicians Navigate Standardized Payment Reform in China"

Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRG) is a case-based payment system that classifies patients into categories and assigns a fixed amount to each. Developed in the United States and adopted by Medicare in the 1980s for cost control, DRGs are now calculated and updated using large-scale hospital performance data and algorithmic adjustments. Chinese policymakers implemented the DRG reform in 2018 expecting the DRG system can facilitate administrative changes that improve hospitals' cost-management capacity similar to the US. However, hospital administrators were reported for directly penalizing doctors for overspend instead of reforming management structure. Doctors also engage in a series of gaming activities including early discharge and rejecting patients with complications under such pressure. Why does the same payment system that standardized disease and treatment fail to function as intended when implemented in China? To investigate this institutional malfunction manifesting in physicians’ everyday practices, this research asks: How does DRG payment reform reshape hospital organizational structures in China, and how do these organizational dynamics mediate physicians’ ability to balance cost control with patient care? To trace the implementation and frontline responses to DRG reform, I will work as an intern in the hospital’s health insurance office and shadow physicians through both inpatient and outpatient practices. As the DRG system is increasingly promoted across developing countries to address the shortage of healthcare funding, this study will illuminate how frontline physicians game on the standardized system, shedding light on how the ostensibly neutral, quantified standard interacts with diverse institutional arrangements and impact physicians’ decision-making differently in practice.

Ivan Aleksandrov (Sociology)

“Intellectual Scramble for Africa: Western Experts, Soviet Africanists, and Postcolonial State Formation”

On the eve of decolonization, Soviet Africanists and Pan-African intellectuals seemed to have plenty of common ground. Their analyses of the historical moment and sweeping critiques of Western empires and scholarship resonated strongly. Their first contacts, which took place over the course of the 1950s, proved productive and consequential (e.g., W.E.B Du Bois's visit finally convinced the Soviet leadership to establish a separate institute responsible for expertise on Africa). Both sides also sought to reorganize the transnational infrastructure underpinning knowledge production about Africa. Yet once interactions between Soviet and African scholars became regular rather than occasional over the 1960s, dissatisfaction set in. Why did their attempts to enter and reform the transnational field of African Studies prove futile? And what consequences did these failures have for developments within Soviet academia itself and within postcolonial state-building efforts on the continent? 

Ragini Jain (Economics)

"Female Sterilization and India’s Fertility Decline" 

Shaoyu Zhang (History)

"Formation of Trading Networks in Indigenous Societies of Southwestern China, 1760-1880"

This project examines the formation of trading networks and market integration in indigenous societies of southwestern China from the mid-eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Prior to Qing incorporation, the region was characterized by pastoral and small-scale subsistence economies embedded in exchange networks linking indigenous highland communities. After Qing conquests, demographic growth, immigration of Han communities from interior China, and state-sponsored mining activities transformed land use patterns and local economic relations. Agricultural production increased, and new commercial crops such as tobacco and opium appeared. British and French imperial expansion later introduced new infrastructure and reshaped patterns of trade.

Focusing on modern-day Yunnan, this study investigates how indigenous populations and Han immigrants participated in emerging markets and how local economies were integrated into imperial and global networks. Preliminary findings suggest that Han migrants participated in agrarian economy while engaging in state-sponsored mining activities, such as facilitating land transactions through guild halls and creating layered systems of land tenancy with indigenous communities. This project further asks how and why economic incorporation into the Qing empire preceded and shaped the terms of European commercial penetration, what motivated indigenous participation, and how indigenous actors negotiated new opportunities and constraints of this dual process. 

Yolian Ogbu (Anthropology)

"The Sun as Sovereign: Energy Infrastructure and Postcolonial Statecraft in Eritrea "

This project examines how Eritrea employs decentralized solar energy infrastructure as a technology of state formation and sovereignty. Emerging from a thirty-year revolutionary struggle in 1991, Eritrea cultivated an ethos of self-reliance that extends to its national energy development today. During the liberation struggle, Eritreans established the sun as a material political terrain and the Eritrean countryside as a site for scientific and technological innovation dedicated to independence. Today, solar mini-grids in villages such as Areza, Maidma, and Dekemhare function not merely as climate solutions but as sovereign techno-politics designed to secure the state against ecological, political, and economic pressures. This research investigates how Eritrea’s solar electrification project materializes postcolonial sovereignty and what this reveals about the relationship between renewable energy infrastructure and state formation amid the planetary threat of climate change and global energy transition. This project challenges existing frameworks in science and technology studies, studies in the anthropology of energy, and the state by demonstrating how decentralized solar systems can constitute a state’s security apparatus rather than undermine state power. In contrast to the petro-states of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Yolian’s research asks: what will define the “solar states” of a post-fossil fuel world? 

Atman Mehta (History)

"A Great Adjustment: the Remaking of the Global Economic Order, 1979-87"

My dissertation explores how Japanese and American financial and energy policies reconfigured the global economy in the late twentieth century. By including Japan and the Asia-Pacific region into our understanding of the period, my goal is to map changes in the governance and flow of capital and critical commodities which together constitute the global economy. With respect to energy policy, my project explores how Japanese energy security measures after the oil shock of late 1973 reordered regional energy and economic relations. For instance, by financing the high costs of capital investment, transferring technology, or guaranteeing demand via long-term purchase contracts, Japan played the leading role in the development of coal in Australia and liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Indonesia. Japan thereby created an enduring regional energy infrastructure in the process: Australia and Indonesia are leading energy producers to date; and the wider Asia-Pacific accounts for over 70 percent of global coal and LNG consumption, acting as a significant driver of rising carbon emissions.  

Similarly, financial deregulation undertaken by Japan and the US transformed the contemporary international financial and monetary system. While the US implemented tax policies which encouraged capital inflows, the Japanese program of financial deregulation effectively reallocated funds to large institutional investors like life insurance companies, who soon became the leading purchasers of American bonds in the 1980s. Japan emerged as the world’s largest exporter of capital at the time, as the US assumed the unprecedented position running chronic trade and current account deficits. Overall, by analyzing the long shadow cast by macroeconomic developments in both these countries, my project contemplates a fresh account of the intertwined transformations of the energy and economic history of the twentieth century. 

Aqiil Gopee (Anthropology)

"Testing Stratigraphy and Trade Assemblages at the Early Islamic Port of al-Uqayr"

This project proposes a pilot field season at al-ʿUqayr (Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia) to determine whether the site preserves intact early Islamic occupation layers and to assess its significance within Indian Ocean commercial networks between the eighth and eleventh centuries CE. Situated on Gulf maritime routes and serving as a harbor for the Aḥsā oasis, with connections toward Basra and along pathways associated with pilgrimage, al-ʿUqayr provides a setting in which different forms of movement were coordinated within an amphibious landscape linking sea and land. Despite this potential, the site remains poorly understood archaeologically and has yet to be integrated into comparisons across early Islamic ports. The field season will include pedestrian survey, the excavation of test trenches, and targeted sediment sampling along the coastal edge. These steps will be used to identify preserved deposits, recover material assemblages that can be compared across sites, and assess shoreline change and sedimentation shaping access to the harbor over time. Establishing a baseline dataset will serve to situate these assemblages within comparative analyses across similar ports, contributing to questions of how value was constituted through the coordination of materials and labor, and how these processes were reconfigured through the vectors of Islam across the Indian Ocean.

Mei Mei (CHD)

"Family Duty and Intergenerational Obligation in Contemporary Shanghai"

While family has historically been central to moral life in China, contemporary family relations have been profoundly shaped by market reform, internal migration, the one-child policy, welfare restructuring, and changing gender order and household arrangements. This project examines how duties and responsibilities are understood, negotiated, and practiced in family life in contemporary urban China. Focusing on the obligations between parents and adult children in Shanghai, the project compares locally rooted Shanghai residents with Shanghai hukou, and rural-origin internal migrants living in Shanghai without local hukou.  

This project investigates three questions: how people understand and practice parental and filial obligations; how tensions among duty, personal aspiration, fairness, affection, and necessity are worked out in everyday life; and how these understandings are shaped by generational groups, migration history, and unequal access to urban resources. Methodologically, the project is based on semi-structured interviews conducted in Shanghai, supplemented by short vignette prompts designed to elicit moral reasoning around concrete family dilemmas. Participants will be recruited both online and offline. The project aims to generate original qualitative data on how family obligations are interpreted and practiced under conditions of urban inequality and social change.  

Dan Walfisch (History)

"Those Who Were Already There: A Jewish Elite in Palestine and Israel, 1840s–1970s "

Across the nineteenth century, a group of families consolidated into a new elite within the Jewish population of Palestine. Their standing rested on commercial wealth, senior religious offices, leadership of communal bodies, representation before Ottoman authorities, and ties with European powers and Jewish communities abroad. The dissertation follows these families from the 1840s to the 1970s, tracing their formation and decline across late Ottoman reform and constitutionalism, the British Mandate, the rise of the new Yishuv and Zionism, the Nakba, and the founding of Israel. It asks how an elite that predated the Zionist immigrations took part in each transformation, was reshaped by it, and ultimately declined. The project enters the world of these families through their material and institutional foundations: wealth, office, and family. From this ground it reads the textures of their politics, ideological worlds, and shifting positions within Palestine, the Ottoman Empire, and the Jewish world. Recovering this trajectory reframes the story of Zionism and the making of Israeli society as a long negotiation with a Jewish society already organized in Palestine, with the Palestinian society it lived among, and with the colonial transformations that reshaped the country. 

Reynell Bardillo Sarmie (Political Science)

"Organizing under Criminal Rule: Collective Action inside Criminal Governance Abstract"

What explains the diverging interactions between criminal groups and civilian organizations? Across Latin America, at least 77 million people live under the rule of a criminal group. In some of these communities, civilians have successfully organized to resist these groups. In others, civilian organizations have been co-opted or violently repressed by them. In this project, I aim to answer two interrelated questions that have been sidestepped in the political violence literature: why criminal groups adopt different strategies toward civilian organizations, and how civilian groups react. 

I treat civilian groups as autonomous political actors capable of choosing among a range of strategies, driven not only by survival imperatives but also by their own agendas. Civil society organizations may supply criminal groups with the social infrastructure needed for governance; in turn, criminal groups may offer these organizations protection or the means to advance their own goals. I explore these interactions across three Latin American countries with a long history of large-scale criminal violence (Colombia) or with recent episodes (Ecuador and Peru). Through interviews with armed groups, civilian leaders and state officials, as well as the systematization of neighborhood-level civilian organizations, I expect to explain the impact of criminal groups on collective action. 

Guilherme Baratho (Sociology)

" A Precarious Turn: Evangelicals and the Far-Right in São Paulo’s Urban Periphery"

Brazilian politics transformed in 2018 when evangelical voters who had supported the leftist Workers’ Party for nearly two decades brought far-right Jair Bolsonaro to power. Existing scholarship explains this shift by focusing on sources and channels for political formation, such as pastoral influence, the expansion of peripheral churches, and the reach of social networks. While these frameworks identify where politics is happening, a critical gap remains: the process by which lay congregants decide their vote. My research asks how religious identity informs political choice and why evangelical voters turned to the far-right in 2018.  

To address this, I examine political formation by treating the roles of congregants and religious institutions as distinct yet co-constitutive. This allows for an understanding of congregants as active political agents who negotiate religious identity alongside their pastors, material realities, and local social issues. Through a comparative ethnography of three peripheral São Paulo neighborhoods with divergent outcomes in the 2018 and 2022 elections, I examine how these negotiations unfold in daily life. By uncovering why some communities resisted the far-right while others embraced it, this project reveals the evangelical vote as a contested, negotiated process essential to understanding the future of Brazilian democratic stability. 

Kim Kolor (Anthropology)

“Siddha Futurities: Pain and Embodied Striving in Sri Lanka's Medical Pluralism ” 

In our militarized 'post-covid' world, where suspicions of medicine proliferate as much as our desire to trust our medical institutions, how do people navigate multiple treatment paths that may seem at odds with one another? This research elucidates how healers and patients move through Sri Lanka's diverse topography of medical pluralism. It takes particular interest in the indigenous Siddha medical tradition, its concepts of embodiment and treatments for enduring pains, as well as how Siddha medicine works alongside or against allopathic (biomedical) practice. The project conducts oral histories to trace genealogies of shifting medical practice, ethnographically attunes to the temporalities of Siddha treatments, and close-reads classical Siddha literatures. As people seek treatments for intractable conditions, varied doubts and suspicions may close off certain treatment paths, open others, and shape people’s capacity to receive and heal by certain medicines—or possibly even people’s capacity to heal by medicine more generally. At stake, then, is not only the question of the grounds for medical efficacy, but also the question of how embodied purposiveness in medicine can transform not only one's pain, but also one's very body.