The Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College provides a variety of national scholarships and fellowships for recipients to engage in dialogue with noted public servants and to pursue a study of public policy.
The following scholars were awarded The Dwight D. Eisenhower/Clifford Roberts Graduate Fellowship for the 2020-21 academic year. These recipients were selected from applicants at an advanced stage of their doctoral candidacies, preferably at the point of preparing their dissertations. Each Eisenhower/Roberts Fellow is awarded $10,000 to support the completion of their research.
Teal Arcadi is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Princeton University; his dissertation is titled Remapping America: The Interstate Highway System and Infrastructural Governance in the Postwar United States. Arcadi’s research examines how the construction of the interstate highway system demonstrated and reinforced the rising power of the mid-twentieth-century administrative state. More than a transportation system, the interstates were a tool with which statebuilders blazed fiscal and legal paths for federal agencies, concretizing non-electoral administrative authority, and producing a physical and governmental edifice insulated from democratic pressure. And that edifice produced far-reaching inequality: fault lines of race, class, gender and sexuality, and environmental destruction followed interstate construction across the national landscape. Claimants who sought to redress social and spatial inequality wrought by the interstates discovered their carefully-designed exclusion from infrastructural planning. In the process, they illuminated the priorities of statebuilding and located the boundaries of administrative justice in modern America.
Francisco Lara-Garcia is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Columbia University; his dissertation is titled MEXTROPOLIS: Civic Life and the Integration of Mexicans in Tucson and Albuquerque. Lara-Garcia’s doctoral work seeks to better connect migration studies with urban sociology. His dissertation asks how local context, specifically the institutional characteristics of local government, bureaucracies and civic organizations, affects the integration of Mexican immigrants living in Tucson, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico. By studying contexts that have not historically received scholarly attention, this dissertation expands our understanding of immigrant life outside of major cities, and suggests ways that local governments and communities can build more just, inclusive cities for all their residents, no matter where they come from.
Lydia Sizer is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University; her dissertation is titled Diplomacy under Risk: How the U.S. Department of State Decides When to Send Diplomats to Dangerous Posts. Sizer’s research will examine how the State Department decides when to take risks sending its diplomats to dangerous places. It will focus on two main case studies: the decision to make the Special Mission Compound (SMC) in Benghazi a permanent presence in 2011-2012 and the decision to suspend operations at U.S. Embassy Damascus in February 2012. Using evidence from these cases, this research will employ the microhistorical method and social network analysis to test the explanatory value of several established and more recent theories of foreign policy decision-making.
Maro Yousseff is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at University of Texas at Austin; her dissertation is titled Women’s Movements During Democratic Transitions: The Case of Tunisia. Youssef’s research on women’s movements seeks to integrate women into the study of democracy and democratization. In her current research, Youssef focuses on Islamist and secular women’s activism during the ongoing democratic transition in Tunisia following the Arab Spring. She explores the relationship between women’s associations and power brokers such as foreign donors and political actors. Her research contributes to policy debates on women’s roles in fostering democracy and stability in Muslim-majority countries.
Candidates for the Eisenhower/Roberts Fellowship must be pursuing their graduate degree from one of the following institutions: Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Tufts University (The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy), University of Chicago, University of Kansas, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, Vanderbilt University or Washington University at St. Louis.