Fellowships

Announcing the 2024 SAE-CES fellowship winner…

The SAE is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2024 SAE-CES Pre-dissertation Research Fellowship is Phoebe Whiteside of Columbia University, with a project entitled “Humanitarian Forensics and the Politics of Kinship at Ireland’s Former Mother and Baby Homes”. This annual award provides $5000 support for doing short-term pre-dissertation fieldwork in the social-cultural anthropology of contemporary Europe, as well as a travel grant to the CES conference and other forms of early career support (for full details, see below).

In the context of the widespread unmarked burials that have been uncovered in recent years at Ireland’s former Mother and Baby homes, Phoebe Whiteside critically approaches the role of forensics in post-conflict settings and the ways in which various movements advocate for DNA testing. The evaluation committee found Whiteside’s proposed ethnographic project to have great potential for yielding a sophisticated and compassionate analysis of both the struggles of grieving families and the work of forensic experts and activists, asking how justice might be achieved for the deaths of hundreds of unnamed children. Whiteside’s engagement with state and institutional violence impressed the evaluators with its originality and importance, combining perspectives from the anthropology of kinship with archival research, archaeology and physical anthropology. Her research promises to give unique insights into what forensic identifications actually do for people. Though focusing on Ireland, her research is well positioned to make a contribution beyond Europeanist anthropology, speaking to comparable issues elsewhere such as the loss of Indigenous children at residential schools in Canada, Australia, and the US, and the killing of children in war zones around the world. See Phoebe’s account of her SAE-CES-funded summer research here.

This year’s alternate winner was Clara Beccaro of The New School, with a project “The Politics of the Injured Body: State Violence, Disabled Protesters, and Political Subjectivity in Contemporary France”. The members of the Evaluating Committee were Gregory Feldman (University of Windsor), Hege Høyer Leivestad (University of Oslo), and Dorothy Zinn (Chair, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano).

SAE-CES Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship

The Society for the Anthropology of Europe and the Council for European Studies jointly sponsor a pre-dissertation research fellowship in anthropology.

Doctoral candidates in anthropology in any university that is a member of CES are eligible to apply (see list here). The fellowship supports short-term (two to three months) independent research in Europe for the purpose of testing the feasibility and research design of a projected doctoral dissertation in the social/cultural anthropology of contemporary Europe. The typical grantee is a second or third-year graduate student who has, or is close to, completing course work and/or Ph.D. qualifying exams, but who has neither fully formulated nor defended a dissertation prospectus 

The fellowship carries a stipend of $5,000. Funds may not be used for language courses or instruction at a European university, or to supplement a comparable or larger fellowship for research in Europe.

Fellowship information, eligibility requirements, and FAQ can be found on the CES awards page. 

More Details

Recipients of the SAE-CES Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship receive:

(1) A $5,000 direct award designed to support a minimum of 8 weeks of field research in Europe, some of which may be used to support attendance at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association to celebrate receipt of the award;

(2) A one-time travel grant intended to support attendance and presentation at the Council’s International Conference of Europeanists;

(3) An opportunity to publish an article on their research in Perspectives on Europe, the Council’s semi-annual journal in European Studies, and in Anthropology News;

(4) Access to a range of informational and cohort-building activities designed to promote professional networking and early career development among CES fellows, including seminars/webinars, special conference events, internships, etc.

Previous Awardees

2023

Giorgia Mirto (Columbia University): “The Political Life of Border Death in South Italy”. Learn more about Mirto’s project by following this link.

This year’s alternate winner was Clara Beccaro of The New School, with a project “Stop aux Mutilations Intersexes!”: The Politics of Intersex Activism in France”.

2022
Ariana Gunderson (Indiana University, Bloomington): “Selling Food as Text in the German Recipe Industry”. 
The alternate was Mariachiara Ficarelli (Harvard) for “’A Chasing After the Wind’: Energy Transition and Visions of Future Nature in the Northern Adriatic” 

2020
Celine Eschenbrenner (Tulane): “Minority in Exile: Biological Age and the French Asylum System”.
The alternate was Jeffrey Gottlieb (University of California, Berkeley) for “Of Hormones and Magnets: An Ethnographic Study of the ‘Dutch Model’ of Care for Transgender Youth and its Corresponding Brain Imaging Research”.

2019
Augusta Thomson (New York University): “Sustaining Pilgrimage in the Anthropocene: Heritage Consumption on the Camino de Santiago.”
Honorable Mention went to Mahmure Idil Ozkan (Northwestern University) for “Jewish Memory in Spain: Language Ideologies, Nation, Citizenship.”

2018
Maria Lechtarova (New York University)
“Translating Rituals of Mourning into Technologies of Exclusion: How Bulgarian Obituary Postings Appropriate Public Discourses of Identity Construction”

2017
Burge Abiral (Johns Hopkins)
“Co-Existing with Pests and Weeds in the Anthropocene: The Ethics and Practice of Ecological Cultivation in Turkey.”

2016
Kieran Kelley (University of Chicago)
“Living with Drugs in the Republic of Ireland”

2015
Sarah French Brennan (Teachers College, Columbia University)
“Intimate Nation: Sexuality and Asylum in the Netherlands.”

2014
Grace Gu (New York University)
“Work, Migration and Crisis in Spain: Evaluating the Eurozone economic model in cultural context.”

2013
Senem Kaptan (Rutgers University)
“The Making of Citizenship Through Law, Justice, and Victimhood in Turkey’s Anti-Coup Trials.”

2012
Laura LeVon, (SUNY Buffalo)
“Being Orange After the Troubles: Constructing and Commemorating Identity in the Aftermath of Violence.”

2011
Tyler Boersen, (New School for Social Research)
“Visible Labor: The Making of a Prec