Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Alan Sharlin Memorial Award Fellows, 2004-2005

Thad Dunning, Political Science: Extractive Industries, Social Conflict, and Institutional Change: Power and Politics in the Rentier States. The existing literature in political science suggests markedly different relationships between oil and mineral wealth and political institutions. While a number of studies, particularly of the Persian Gulf states, suggest that oil and minerals foster authoritarian stability, allowing repressive leaders to hang on to power longer than they otherwise would, resources have also been causally linked to coups and conflict in West Africa and elsewhere. And in the literature on Venezuela, some scholarship sees oil wealth as a contributing cause of the advent of democracy in 1958. In this project, Mr. Dunning attempts to integrate these three sets of hypotheses -- which link resources to authoritarian stability, coups and conflict, and the advent and durability of democracy, respectively -- into an explicitly comparative context. He investigates how the likelihood of one or another of these outcomes might increase or decrease as a function of the interaction of resources with particular social and historical contexts, including the form of ownership in the resource sector, the degree of inequality of private wealth, and other factors. This dissertation will take advantage of a range of comparative and historical evidence, as well as a diversity of methodological tools, to investigate this question.

Amy Harris, History: Siblings in Georgian England. This dissertation centers on brother and sister relationships in Georgian England. While the history of family life and demographics have been studied in depth, certain areas remain under-explored; siblings are one such area. Ms. Harris's evidence comes from three general categories: family/personal records, legal records, and published records. By compiling evidence from over twenty families' diaries and correspondence, she has developed a rich resource from which to tell the story of middle-class family life. Legal records revealed disputed probates much farther down the economic scale than family records allow. And published records allowed her to study cultural expectations expressed in such media as plays, novels, sermons, and poetry. Thus far, this evidence has exposed a world of important family functions performed by siblings, but often unrecognized, even by contemporaries. It also offers insight into the gendered expectations placed on family members that defy simple categorization as child, parent, or spouse. The fascinating thing is how an individual had to simultaneously fill and perform the roles of daughter/son, parent, spouse, brother/sister, aunt, cousin, nephew, etc. Brothers and sisters were expected to share one another’s lives, their entire lives. From mundane daily chores to advice on career and marriage, siblings were the family relationship that lasted a lifetime, exacting its own specific cost and providing its own specific benefits.