The Center is pleased to welcome the following Graduate Prize Fellows for the 2024-25 academic year.
Victoria Bergbauer
Victoria Bergbauer is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History. She is currently completing her dissertation, which will offer the first transnational history of the formerly incarcerated. By tracing the trajectories of adolescents beyond the walls of the prison, her dissertation expands beyond the architecture of incarceration to a wider normative infrastructure that undergirded the development of restorative justice and modern European statehood. Her broader research on normalization in the nineteenth century has appeared in English, French, and Italian publications. Victoria has served as a humanities tutor for Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative and is co-editing a volume on “The Architecture of Confinement,” the title of the 2022 conference that she co-organized at Princeton University.
Atticus Carnell
Atticus Carnell is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in political theory. He’s interested in what we owe to each other in communicating, the nature of respect, recognition, and authority, and the moral foundations of democracy. He’s also interested in social theory, particularly in how new forms of technological mediation complicate received models of social reproduction. His dissertation deals with all these topics, developing a respect- and recognition-based account of the value of democracy and the informal distribution of democratic voice, revising some social-theoretical canon for the digital age, and applying this work to develop some design principles for traditional and social media. He has a BA in politics from Bowdoin College and an MPhil in political theory from Balliol College, Oxford. He spent a year as an AmeriCorps Climate Action Fellow in Portland, ME before starting at Princeton.
Reece Edmends
Reece Edmends is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Classics. He is especially interested in Roman politics and political theory, and his dissertation explores the way the emperor Augustus used the motif of 'liberation' in his political advertising. Other research interests include the role of Cicero in the development of Roman constitutionalism, and the relationship between Rome's civic architecture and ideas of freedom. Reece is originally from the U.K. He has a B.A. and M.Phil. in Classics from King's College, Cambridge, and an M.A. in European Interdisciplinary Studies from the College of Europe, Warsaw.
Andrew Hahm
Andrew Hahm is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics. He studies the normative problems raised by the modern administrative state in democratic societies, with particular attention to the history and institutions of American public administration. His dissertation seeks to understand how to best interpret democratic norms of political inclusion and mass participation within the context of administrative rulemaking and adjudication. In doing so, it aims to develop a distinctively democratic theory of the administrative state. Andrew holds an A.B. degree from Princeton and an M.A. degree from Queen's University, Kingston.
Sayash Kapoor
Sayash Kapoor is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. He is a coauthor of “AI Snake Oil,” a book that provides a critical analysis of artificial intelligence, separating the hype from the true advances. His research examines the societal impacts of AI, with a focus on reproducibility, transparency, and accountability in AI systems. He is especially interested in the interaction between AI and policy. He has previously worked on AI in various institutions in academia and the industry, including at Facebook, Columbia University, and EPFL Switzerland. Kapoor has been recognized with various awards, including a best paper award at ACM FAccT, an impact recognition award at ACM CSCW, and inclusion in TIME’s inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI.
Halee Robinson
Halee Robinson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and a certificate student in the Department of African American Studies. She specializes in the histories of race, punishment, and freedom in the United States. Her dissertation explores the effects and consequences of the Texas penal system on the everyday lives of Black, Mexican, Indigenous, and poor white people in Texas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, her project illuminates the central role that family and community played not only in the punitive aims of the state, but also in the ways that incarcerated and free people alike resisted state violence and punishment and articulated their own conceptions of justice. Halee received her M.A. in history from Princeton University and her B.A. in history and political science from Vanderbilt University.
Sebastián Rojas Cabal
Sebastián is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology. His research spans political sociology, organizational sociology, and the sociology of development. His dissertation explores the extent to which state agencies in Colombia, amidst ongoing conflict and multiple peace negotiations since the 1980s, became pockets of organizational effectiveness while implementing peace-related policies. Sebastián's broader research includes the history of violence as a topic of social scientific study in Latin America, the comparative historical sociology of the state, and the response of U.S.-based nonprofits to changes in domestic legislation. Sebastián graduated summa cum laude from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) in 2017, where he studied social research and public policy with a concentration in economics. At Princeton, he was Lassen Fellow in the Program in Latin American Studies during the 2019-2020 academic year.
Darren Yau
Darren Yau joined the doctoral program in Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Princeton's Department of Religion in 2019. His research focuses on how religious commitments shape and are shaped by debates in political theory, especially as formulated by American pragmatists, Social Gospel reformers, and Black political theorists of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. His dissertation uses Martin Luther King Jr.’s political philosophy of non-violence to explore the grounds, limits, and objections to non-violent direct action in democratic social movements under unjust background conditions. His additional projects concern Marxist accounts of racism and religion, the role of religious institutions in distributive justice, pacifist arguments about global justice, and other philosophical questions that arise from early-to-mid-twentieth century debates about social reform. Darren’s research has been supported by the Center for the Study of Culture, Society, and Religion, the Department of African American Studies, and the Effron Center for the Study of America. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Wheaton College.
Elaine Yim
Elaine Yim specializes in political theory with interests in activism, democratic boundary problem, and ethnography. Her dissertation examines the role of activism in remedying our ‘global legitimacy deficit,’ the idea that our global governance structure in addressing global justice concerns including climate justice are unjust. Her project combines political theory with ethnographic methods, exploring the democratic values manifested in existing global justice activism movements. Outside of her dissertation work, she is also interested in immigration ethics, democratic theory and normative ethics.
Christopher Zraunig
Christopher Zraunig joined the doctoral program in the Department of Anthropology in 2019. Christopher's dissertation project centers around questions of good aging in the queer communities of Berlin and New York City: How do subjects who fail to adhere to heteronormative and ableist norms of successful aging create good later life for themselves and their chosen families? Christopher’s answers to this question are informed by more than 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork. They hold a BA and a MSc from the University of Amsterdam, for which they conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the long-term trajectory of HIV. Christopher is currently also working on a verbatim style play based on this material. Before coming to Princeton, Christopher worked as a researcher on an interdisciplinary project on dementia care at the Amsterdam University Medical Center VUMC.