U.S. Fellows 2022-2023 Archives - Page 10 of 10

Dr. Mark Balmforth is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His work analyses inherited inequality in histories of encounter between South Asians, Europeans, and Americans. His first book project, titled “Schooling the Master: Caste Supremacy and American Education in British Ceylon,” charts the entwining of caste, nation, and gender in American missionary schools in Ceylon and was awarded the History of Education Society’s 2021 Claude A. Eggertsen Prize. Dr. Balmforth’s second major research project, tentatively titled “Buried Legacies: Slavery and Caste in the Indian Ocean,” rethinks connections between enslavement, caste, and migration in the Indian Ocean by tracing the 300-year odyssey of an oppressed-caste Tamil community from the 17th to the 20th centuries. His work has been published in the History of Education Quarterly, Review of Development & Change, CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, and the International Journal of Asian Christianity.

Legacies of slavery shape conversations around the world about contemporary social and economic injustice. Over the last decade, scholars of South Asia have started to consider slavery’s impact on contemporary lives in the subcontinent, countering the dominant public and scholarly reliance upon terms like “bonded labor” or “agrestic servitude.” Contributing to the ongoing global conversation about slavery’s legacy, Dr. Balmforth’s Fulbright-Nehru project asks: what can the history of Dalit dye root-digging communities in India reveal about the intertwined careers of slavery and caste in South Asia?

Dr. Boaz Atzili is an Associate Professor at the School of International Service of American University in Washington DC. He holds a PhD in Political Science from MIT and a BA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Before coming to AU Dr. Atzili held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University. His research focuses on territorial conflicts and peace, the politics of borders and borderlands, the security aspects of state weakness, and deterrence and coercion. He published two books, Good Fences Bad Neighbors: Border Fixity and International Conflict (University of Chicago Press: 2012), and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (Columbia University Press: 2018, with Wendy Perlman), as well as edited Territorial Designs and International Politics (Routledge: 2018, with Burak Kaderchan). His articles have been published, among other venues, in International Security, Security Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, International Studies Review, and Territory, Politics, Governance.

Among other awards, Dr. Atzili’s work has gained the 2006 Edger E. Furniss Award for the best first book in international security from the Mershon Center for International Security, and the Kenneth N. Waltz Prize for the best 2006 dissertation in the area of security studies, from the American Political Science Association.

Dr. Atzili’s current project focuses on borderlands and buffer zones. He is interested in the way in which the interaction between center and periphery in borderlands affect interstate relations at the border, and the way international relations affect center-periphery relations within the borderlands. The project includes quantitative and qualitative components and an inter-regional comparison of South Asia and the Middle East.

India inherited from its British colonialists the notion that modern nation-state’s sovereignty stretches uniformly up to a country’s borders. But it also inherited a reality in which the presence of the state in its remote mountainous borderlands was very scarce. Dr. Atzili’s Fulbright-Nehru project seeks an investigation of center-periphery relations in the Indian borderlands with China and Nepal in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Ladakh. Through archival research and interviews, the research aims to advance our understanding of the role of center-periphery interaction in shaping perceptions, policies, and realities in the western Himalayas, at the edge of the Indian state.