Phelan US Centre PhD Summer Research Grants

Jack Roush, Department of International History

My PhD dissertation examines the role of informal actors in relations between the United States (US) and Iran between the 1946 Soviet withdrawal and the 1979 revolution. It utilises a range of sources (in both English and Persian) to analyse how a transnational network of Pahlavi courtiers, US arms and oil industry executive, and international financiers shaped diplomatic initiatives and significant policy decisions. Specifically, it engages with US-led development projects in the 1940s, Iran’s evolution into a US security partner through the 1960s, Iranian investment and formation of a political lobby in the US, and efforts to protect the Shah after the revolution. It seeks to transcend long-standing assumptions in the field, regarding patron-client dynamics between the US and Iran and the primacy of the Shah within Iranian politics.

Through this approach, my research also offers insight on broader themes in the study of the global Cold War. By adopting a pericentric framework, it demonstrates how small states like Iran influenced the actions and objectives of powers like the US. Furthermore, it seeks to demonstrate the importance of both ideological considerations and economic interests in US policymaking during the Cold War and examine the tensions between the two. Ultimately, by de-centring formal policymakers, my dissertation offers a unique account of a significant bilateral relationship in Cold War history and evaluates its implications for later decades.

Based on these objectives, my research is guided by the following core questions:

• What role did informal actors have in Iran-US relations?

• Did informal actors act according to their own agency, or were they beholden to state interests?

• How can formal/informal politics be conceptualized?

• How does the study of informal actors affirm or challenge the assumption that Iran was a US client state?

Daniele Sudsataya, Department of Health Policy

My PhD thesis investigates the heterogeneity in vaccine uptake and vaccine incentive receptiveness observed during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, where public opinions were being fragmented due to the politicization of health matters, proliferation of misinformation, and lack of institutional confidence (Kriss, 2022). As prior research has scarcely considered the role of an individual’s core values in shaping their vaccination choices, I will explore this idea in three papers.

The first paper will investigate the role political core values play in influencing an individual’s receptiveness to different COVID-19 vaccination incentives during the pandemic in the USA. By parametrizing the cost of getting vaccinated, I will analyze the trade-off between money and the cognitive cost that may occur when an individual engages in an action (in this case vaccination) that can signal political group norms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The second paper assesses whether insurance as a monetary incentive played a role in influencing COVID-19 vaccination. During the pandemic, five US states expanded their Medicaid program to cover individuals of a certain household income bracket under the Affordable Care Act. I will compare differences in COVID-19 vaccine uptake in states before and after expanding Medicaid coverage to states that did not expand. As this program was a flagship policy of the Obama administration, political core values may be a potential effect driver.

The third paper will investigate an observed ethnic minority gap in COVID-19 vaccination uptake in in the US (Fuller et al., 2021). Focusing on ethnic group membership, I will elicit if the heterogeneity in individuals’ receptiveness to COVID vaccine incentivization policies was impacted by community-driven norms, perhaps passed down through shared experiences, with one example pertaining to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Alsan and Wanamaker, 2018).

Arianna Parisi, Department of International History

My PhD thesis explores Black abolitionist feminism and aims to investigate how it developed and evolved in the United States. Rather than prison abolitionism being viewed as a primarily contemporary movement, it has a much longer history that can be traced back to the work carried out by Black feminists in organisations against gender violence in the 1970s. It can also be traced back to the 1971 Attica prison riot and the wider response to the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s. The project investigates prison abolitionism considering Black women’s essential contribution to developing the theory and being important participants as activists in the larger movement from the beginning. This necessity arises from the fact that traditional historiography has generally neglected Black women’s political influences and contributions in the history of the Civil Rights Movement or the Black Power Movement. Recent scholarship by Robyn C. Spencer (2016) and Ashley D. Farmer (2017) filled these gaps by showing how Black women were primary theorists and activists during both these eras. However, none of these pioneering works have researched specifically Black women’s involvement in the prison abolition movement. Yet this investigation is crucial for a deeper understanding of the long trajectory of Black abolitionist feminism and a full comprehension of Black feminism since debates about prison were central to many theorists.

The project also aims to study the roots of Black feminist abolitionism by looking at its linkages to other liberation movements and struggles. Additionally, the thesis will examine how Black feminism has influenced contemporary anti-carceral activism, particularly within organisations such as the Movement for Black Lives, and how it helped popularise both Black feminism and prison abolitionism. This will involve an analysis of Black feminist publications, speeches, and organisational documents from the 1970s to the present, to track how debates around prison abolition have evolved.

Mina Rigby-Thompson, Department of International History

My dissertation research utilizes the 1974 Cyprus crisis as a lens through which to examine how American policymakers understood and responded to the challenge of two of their allies (Greece and Turkey) potentially going to war in a region that the United States had deemed geostrategically vital to its own interests, as well as to NATO’s broader security agenda. I am driven by questions relating to how American policymakers understood this dilemma, what methods were proposed to handle the conflict, and how the United States ultimately chose to respond. I am interested in the notion of inter-alliance conflict, what that says about US foreign policy and NATO in the mid-1970s, and what lessons, if any, policymakers took away from the crisis. This topic falls under the Phelan Centre’s research theme of “Rethinking America’s Role in the World,” and given the ongoing tension and continuing UN peacekeeping force present on the island, this research has both historical and contemporary implications. My dissertation will add to the growing conversation around the role of the “West” in global politics, the continuing relevance of NATO in a post-Cold War world, and the challenges that arise during inter-alliance conflict.

Isolde Hegemann, Department of Government

Fake news on social media add to the existing pressure that US democracy finds itself under as many social media posts employ misinformation. In the case of Meta, fact-checking organisations are now supposed to be substituted by community-based systems of flagging misleading content. Beyond discussions around how this will affect what content gets flagged, a crucial question when evaluating these two strategies is how much people trust in independent fact-checkers and community-based tools and how this affects whether they believe flagged content or not.

However, the role of different fact-checking strategies prevalent on social media platforms today to counter fake news has not been investigated comprehensively (Broda & Strömbäck, 2024). Research on how misinformation shapes people’s beliefs only recently started considering social media (Newman et al., 2020). And while we know that fact-checking can play an important role in making people aware of misinformation, studies that have investigated the effects of fact-checking on social media on people’s beliefs did not include the examination of different strategies (Porter & Wood, 2021), lacked external validity (Gaozhao, 2021), or did not provide causal identification strategies (Li & Chang, 2022).

Therefore, I want to answer the question: What is the role of different fact-checking strategies in whether users believe content on social media or not, and how is this affected by other contextual clues like the co-partisanship of the poster?

Ali Glisson, Department of Geography and Environment

Why do seemingly similar regions experience markedly different economic outcomes over time?

There are both theoretical and empirical motivations for this exploration. Much of the prevailing literature in both economics and economic geography has rightly concentrated on the polarisation of wages and extremes of regional performance. On one hand, significant literature examines U.S. urban agglomerations, such as New York City and San Francisco, emphasising their importance as nodes of innovation and competitive advantage. These "superstar" city regions are characterised by high-income levels, a skilled labour force, and large populations. On the other hand, recent research has focused on "left-behind" and peripheral city regions, many of which have undergone rapid deindustrialisation, transitioning from once-thriving economic centres to areas marked by slow or declining population growth and relative stagnation or decline in income.

However, between these two extremes, there may be other pathways of urban development that have been shaped by globalisation trends since the 1970s in a different way. This paper intends to focus on regions with average to above-average development—those that are neither declining nor stagnating—but are holding their own relative to the more dynamic or polarised system of U.S. regions.

To achieve this, the study employs a matching strategy to create many-to-many pairs of regions with similar absolute levels of income and population, as well as growth rates in the 1970s. While many pairs of regions continue to grow similarly, others diverge from one another in terms of income or population—or both. Some regions grow to benefit from agglomeration economies while their paired regions remain relatively stagnant. This framework allows for exploring the underlying conditions contributing to these different paths.

Partha Moman, Department of International Relations

This project forms part of my PhD thesis, of which the core research question is: how and why have security policies around conflict-affected countries evolved since the end of the Cold War? Through a case study of how Somali security evolved, it makes the argument that this change can be in large part explained by the wider changes in global politics – the diffusion of power away from the west, the fragmentation of global governance institutions, and the diversification of ideas of international away from liberalism. A well as delivering this argument through my PhD thesis, I aiming to develop at least two peer-reviewed publications from the project.

My research takes a case study approach looking at successive phases in Somali security policy – the 1990s in the heyday of unipolarity, the 2000s and the primacy of the war on terror, and the contemporary period of western decline. For each period I will process trace the negotiation and contestation of security policy between diplomats from different countries, Somali officials, and other informal influencers.

For the contemporary period, the process tracing will be based on elite interviews with government officials from Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Middle Eastern countries with security links to Somalia, as well as Western diplomats and officials. Whilst I have used other sources of funding to plan trips to Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Middle Eastern countries, the research would greatly benefit from interviews with US policymakers at headquarters, as the US continues to play a very important, if changing role, in Somali security.

Maximilian Goehmann, Department of Management

My study examines how automated trading systems (ATS) and flawed financial data contribute to market instability, focusing on the 2010 Flash Crash as a case study of systemic regulatory failure.

This work is essential for understanding how regulatory gaps in U.S. financial markets affect economic security, investor trust, and the role of government in safeguarding financial stability. While existing financial regulations, such as the Dodd-Frank Act and SEC oversight mechanisms, aim to mitigate risk, high-frequency trading (HFT) and algorithmic market-making continue to challenge traditional regulatory frameworks.

Kaia Turowski, Department of Law

Amicus curiae briefs, which appear in courts internationally, are legal briefs submitted by entities other than the direct parties in litigation. They come from academics, corporations, governments, and others. Judges frequently rely on amicus briefs since they may provide additional perspective and speak to issues not addressed by the litigants. However, there are concerns about the “me too” amicus briefs that merely echo litigant briefs, the advocacy-motivated nature of certain briefs, and the unchecked information that amici may provide to courts. Ultimately, amicus briefs serve as versatile legal tools, and as their presence has increased in U.S. litigation, their recognition as a tool for judicial lobbying has solidified. While amicus scholarship is quite extensive nowadays, the role of these briefs in climate litigation– a rapidly evolving area of law tackling unprecedented issues– remains largely unexplored. The lawsuits brought by U.S. governments against the fossil fuel industry have drawn significant attention, yet the impact of the more than 230 amicus briefs in such cases remains unknown. This dissertation seeks to address this critical gap.