Current Fellowship Recipients
Fellowship Awardees
Oforiwaa Pee Agyei-Boakye
Oforiwaa Pee Agyei-Boakye is a Transport Geography doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She studies the spatial impacts of public transportation, particularly assessing the impact of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) investments on travel patterns in African cities. She also focuses on BRTs' broader relevance to spatial accessibility, mobility, and informal transport systems. Her long-term goal is to contribute to sustainable transportation networks that meet the fast pace of urbanization in Africa.
Jenny Bueno
Jenny Bueno is a PhD candidate at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. She is passionate about understanding changes in coastal habitats that are driven by human activities and climate change. Jenny’s dissertation research focuses on using remote sensing to document these changes. She is studying how drones can be used to monitor intertidal oyster reefs in the Apalachicola Bay region of Florida, where oyster populations have been declining. This approach will help practitioners quickly assess reef status to make informed management decisions. Jenny is also researching mangrove expansion at their northern limit in Apalachicola Bay, Florida. Specifically, she is examining how quickly mangroves have expanded over the last decade using aerial imagery and she is analyzing the spatial distributions of two species, red and black mangroves, and how these species are displacing saltmarsh vegetation. She hopes this research will assist with predicting where mangroves will continue to establish in a changing climate.
Hannah Friedrich
Hannah Friedrich is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation explores aligning satellite-based indicators of post-hurricane recovery with interviews and administrative records on heirship property, households’ use of homeowners insurance, and litigation with insurance companies in Southwest Louisiana. Applying mixed methods, her research aims to identify the socio-legal limitations households face in addressing losses from extreme events and how this creates uneven geographies of recovery. Friedrich’s long-term research agenda is to work alongside disaster-impacted communities to translate inequities documented with various data sources to policymakers and advocate for more just climate adaptation. She earned her Master’s in Geography from Oregon State University and her Bachelor’s in Geography and Geographic Information System/Cartography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Tamar Law
Tamar Law is a PhD student at Cornell University in Global Development. She holds an MPhil in Human Environmental Geography from the University of Oxford. Her research examines the politics of climate governance in Southeast Asia. This dissertation interrogates the politics of mangrove restoration in Indonesia’s new low-carbon development plan through Blue Carbon governance. Law examines how new forms of speculative climate governance and land valuation via the financing of Blue Carbon inform agrarian change in Indonesia. Through multi-sited ethnography, Law examines how scientific expertise, financial investment, and social relations inform the socio-technical process of mangrove restoration. Law considers how Blue Carbon governance developed at a national scale is locally experienced, evaluating the local livelihood, labor, and land-use impacts of the State-led Mangrove for Coastal Resilience Project (M4CR) in the Mahakam Delta, home to Indonesia’s largest and most degraded mangrove systems.
Mirella Pretell
Mirella Pretell is a Peruvian political ecologist and decolonial feminist. She is a woman geographer of Quechua Indigenous descent, born and raised in Peru. She's a Ph.D. Candidate in Geography at Syracuse University, specializing in political ecology, feminist geography, and postcolonial and Indigenous geographies. With over a decade of experience in environmental-related issues and in-ground expertise in the Andes Amazon, she is deeply committed to environmental justice and has a longstanding engagement with Indigenous peoples. She was Head of the Amazon's Loreto Office of Peru's Environmental Protection Agency. She also worked for UNDP in implementing the Joint Declaration of Intent between Peru, Norway, and Germany to reduce deforestation in the Amazon, among other Amazon-related initiatives. Her work focuses on gender, Indigenous movements, resource extraction, and environmental justice. Her research builds upon a long-lasting partnership with the Indigenous Women's Organization Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana.
Sahithya Venkatesan
Sahithya Venkatesan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. Her dissertation research, funded by a Junior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Evelyn L. Pruitt National Fellowship for Dissertation Research, investigates the historic place-making practices of marginalized Dalit communities in the Cauvery Delta, with a broad focus on the political ecologies of caste, agrarian political economy, and climate change. Sahithya holds a master's degree in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where she specialized in urbanization and development. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at the Center for Policy Research and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), two leading institutions in development policy. Her work aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of social and environmental justice in South Asia.
Poonam Suresh Argade
Poonam is a PhD Candidate (Social Sciences) in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She is interested in environment and development politics and draws on transnational, decolonial, and Dalit-Bahujan feminisms, urban geography, and critical development studies. Her doctoral research with the Pani Haq Samiti (Water Rights Campaign) delves into how Mumbai’s water organizers advance an alliance-based politics for water justice with a focus on access in informal settlements. For examining the emergence of water ontologies rooted in regional histories of difference(s) along caste, religion, class, and gender, this project deploys feminist ethnography and collaborative writing methods. Further, Poonam is also working on a publicly available video archive of organizers’ stories developed in conversation with the collective. In her spare time, Poonam likes to indulge in TV dramedies, food and karaoke.
Ellie Cleasby
Ellie Cleasby (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her current research considers the unequal global burdens generated by large volumes of clothing waste, particularly along economic, social and environmental lines. She is particularly interested in the ways that people in Ghana, the US and the UK are employing practices of making and mending clothing to subvert the fast fashion industry. An interest which stems from her own participatory fashion practices. Broadly, she is thinking about the role of care in subversive practices that produce more sustainable futures.
Lauren Gerlowski
Lauren Gerlowski is a human geography PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the direction of co-advisors Dr. Kristopher Olds and Dr. Stephen Young. Her dissertation project engages with urban geography, feminist political economy, and cultural industries to address how neoliberal urban economic policy affects and is challenged by dancers, dance, and urban space in the global city of Chicago, IL. This dissertation is motivated by her background in professional concert dance where she performed and choreographed in modern, contemporary, tap, and musical theater productions. This firsthand knowledge informs her research questions and passion to understand the socio-spatial dynamics of dance and the urban political economy. Beyond her dissertation project, Lauren has been recognized for her commitment to student-centered pedagogy when she was awarded a Teaching Fellows Award by the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Letters and Sciences.
Lauren R. Pearson
Lauren R. Pearson is a PhD Candidate in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her M.A. from the University College London and her B.A. from New York University. Her dissertation “Land on Fire: Crisis, uneven development, and new southern questions in Mezzogiorno Italy” explores the intersection of crisis, austerity, uneven development, and mafia related crimes within the phenomena of illegally set wildfire in north-central Sicily. Her research has been supported by Trinity College's Research Grant in Modern Italian History (the “Barbieri” Grant), The Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, The Berkeley-Naples Fellowship, Università degli Studi di Napoli-Federico II, the Society of Women Geographers’ Evelyn L. Pruitt Fellowship, and the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley.
Mandy Truman
My name is Mandy Truman. I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. My graduate studies have focused on cultural geography, Black Geographies, music geography, and cultural economy. My project focuses on the Mississippi Delta region and the uneven development of the blues tourist economy in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I was drawn to this region from my very first visit by the people I met, the music I heard, the places I experienced, the interactions I encountered, and wanting to understand the long history of racism that remains visible in many ways. The city is rich in blues and civil rights history, specifically in what was historically the Black side of town, known as the New World District. Blues tourism has been the focus of the city’s economic growth. Blues tourism developed in downtown Clarksdale where buildings have been restored and new businesses have been established. Downtown Clarksdale is historically known as the white side of town, where blues music would’ve never been heard during the Jim Crow era. Blues music evolved, developed, and could be heard on every corner in the New World District since its establishment in the early 1900s, where Black businesses thrived and supported the community. With every visit I have made to Clarksdale, the number of mostly white-owned businesses downtown has continued to grow, while the number of demolished buildings and empty lots in the New World District also continued to grow. This project focuses on understanding the history of the New World District, what it meant to the Black community members that lived there, and hearing the valuable memories that remain with residents who still have stories to share. This project will also examine the uneven development of the city’s blues tourist economy and why there has been no effort made to preserve the historic Black part of town, while downtown Clarksdale continues to grow and benefit from the Black culture and traditions that were born in the New World District.
Nicole Tu-Maung Venker
Nicole T. Venker is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment. Her research examines livelihoods, labor, and land relations along transnational routes of migration that span Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, and to the United States. As a critical, feminist geographer, Nicole uses qualitative, visual, and participatory methods to tell human stories about the environment. Her dissertation project, tentatively titled, “Living off the Land: Migration from Myanmar and the Dislocations of Nature in Refugee Lives” traces Myanmar migrants shifting relationships to land in the context of armed conflict, forced displacement, and refugee migration. Her work focuses on how migrants experience, envision, and renegotiate their relationship to land within sites of resettlement, and in a transitioning Myanmar. Along transnational routes of refugee migration, she investigates structures of mobility, changes in everyday practices of subsistence, labor, and leisure, as well as migrants’ visions of environmental and social justice. The Evelyn L. Pruitt Dissertation Research Fellowship will allow Nicole to conduct 7 months of policy and grounded fieldwork in Thailand.
Oforiwaa Pee Agyei-Boakye
Oforiwaa Pee Agyei-Boakye is a Transport Geography doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She studies the spatial impacts of public transportation, particularly assessing the impact of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) investments on travel patterns in African cities.
She also focuses on BRTs’ broader relevance to spatial accessibility, mobility, and informal transport systems. Her long-term goal is to contribute to sustainable transportation networks that meet the fast pace of urbanization in Africa.
Poonam Suresh Argade
Poonam is a PhD Candidate (Social Sciences) in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She is interested in environment and development politics and draws on transnational, decolonial, and Dalit-Bahujan feminisms, urban geography, and critical development studies.
Her doctoral research with the Pani Haq Samiti (Water Rights Campaign) delves into how Mumbai’s water organizers advance an alliance-based politics for water justice with a focus on access in informal settlements. For examining the emergence of water ontologies rooted in regional histories of difference(s) along caste, religion, class, and gender, this project deploys feminist ethnography and collaborative writing methods. Further Poonam is also working on a publicly available video archive of organizers’ stories developed in conversation with the collective. In her spare time, Poonam likes to indulge in TV dramedies, food and karaoke.