Directory

I was born in the second largest city located in a desert after Cairo, towards the end of a never-ending dictatorship. Growing up in Lima, I soon learned that Peru was a country which amalgamated many conflicting realities that were not easily reconciled. My drive to address some of these issues and think laterally has been the stimulus for my work as a researcher, journalist, editor and academic consultant. From a young age, my reluctance to yield to well-demarcated routes has broadened my perspectives and motivated me to find my own path while collaborating with others to create change. Covering dictatorship novels, autobiographical writing and the role of emotions in fiction, my three theses have contributed to advance knowledge at the intersection of literature and sociology. At Cambridge, my PhD project will explore how a group of South American authors grappled with pain and dissatisfaction in their artistic and extraliterary experiences through the diary form. By so doing, I hope to shed light on the value of a sentimental approach to adversity in life-writing, as well as the configurations of masculinity that emanate from it. I am deeply indebted to the Gates Cambridge Trust for giving me this unparalleled opportunity.

Previous Education

Universitat de Barcelona Advanced Literary Studies 2022
McGill University Sociology and Hispanic Studies 2020

I completed my PhD in History in 2019, and after two years working as a Departmental Lecturer in Modern European History at Christ Church, University of Oxford, I am now a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. My first monograph is appearing with Oxford University Press later in 2022 (see https://global.oup.com/academic/product/prussia-in-the-historical-culture-of-the-german-democratic-republic-9780192865908?lang=en&cc=no)

Atticus DeProspo, United States, received his B.S. degree in Industrial & Labor Relations from Cornell University, graduating with honors. He was a member of the Cornell Varsity Men's Soccer Team for four years, helping them win an Ivy League Title. Previously, he worked in Florida and Washington D.C. as an intern for Senator Marco Rubio. Atticus also interned at the Supreme Court of the United States for Justice Sotomayor. Atticus was a member of the inaugural class of the Schwarzman Scholars Program, where he graduated with a Master’s degree in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Atticus was selected as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar, where he graduated with an M.Phil. degree in Criminology from the University of Cambridge. Atticus received his J.D. from The University of Alabama School of Law. He clerked for Chief Judge L. Scott Coogler on the US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. Atticus also clerked for Judges Peter Hall and Steven Menashi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Currently, he works as an associate at Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C.

Previous Education

Cornell University

Links

https://www.wc.com/Attorneys/Atticus-DeProspo
https://www.linkedin.com/in/atticus-deprospo-b27560228?challengeId=AQFmP10UHNL8sAAAAYc4BDztW10bFedB98prwDzszCvj2ncGX4c8O3FGZSNuw

I am currently completing a PhD dissertation entitled 'Emotional Rhetoric and Holy War in Middle English Romance'. From October 2016, I will be a Junior Research Fellow at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

As an archaeologist of indigenous descent, I am committed to improving the lives of Andean communities by empowering them to assert their cultural rights. During my ten years of professional experience in Peru’s Ministry of Culture, I have collaborated with Indigenous people on projects to preserve archaeological sites and landscapes that are crucial to their cultural identity and well-being. Engagement in such projects enables communities to participate in heritage decision-making, fostering their sense of citizenship. From colonial times, Peruvian society has been characterised by systemically discriminating Indigenous people. So, I firmly believe heritage is a powerful instrument to tackle this, granting communities a platform to become political actors by speaking out, being heard, and caring for their cultural properties.I am also interested in unravelling the role of heritage and the politics of the past in contemporary Peru. Using a mixed research methodology (ethnographic data, archival research, and statistics), I am studying how closely heritage is related to the modernisation of the Peruvian state in the 20th century, periods of widespread state violence, and Neo-extractivism.

Previous Education

Universidad de San Marcos Archaeology 2022
Universidad de San Marcos Archaeology 2014

I am a researcher in contemporary Europeans philosophy, working on the question of social transformation. Currently, I am affiliated with Aarhus University, Denmark. Previously, I was a researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and an Early Career Innovation Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick (2018-19), where I also held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015-18).

Links

http://aias.au.dk/aias-fellows/iwona-janicka
http://iwonajanicka.net

Tala Jarjour is a scholar of music, religion and anthropology who studies the Middle East and the Arab world. She has a background in Ethnomusicology, Historical Musicology and violin Performance. She is particularly interested in intersections between politics, culture and religious musics in and from the region – especially Levantine traditions such as Christian and Sufi musics. Her research interests include arts and humanities higher education in the Middle East.

As a Gates Scholar and recipient of the Overseas Research Studentship Award Scheme, Tala wrote her PhD on Syriac chant in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Her past and current research examines emotion, aesthetics, modality, identity, minority and ethno-religiosity, society and performance, survival, cultural heritage, nation and power, peace and war studies, as well as migration and integration.

Dr Jarjour held Assistant Professor positions in music and anthropology at New York University Abu Dhabi and the University of Notre Dame where she was also Faculty Fellow of the Kroc Institute of the Medieval Institute, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Previous visiting faculty positions include Yale University’s Music Department and the University of Salzburg. Research positions include Yale University and the Excellence Initiative at the University of Tübingen. She is currently Associate Fellow of Pierson College at Yale and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London.

Dr Jarjour has worked with and consulted for a number of academic, nonprofit, as well as private and public sector entities in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Middle East. Those include L’Arche, The Clerk’s, Al-Fanar, the Manchester International Festival, the University of Salzburg, and the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She has appeared on national and international media such as the BBC Radio 3 and CNN International, and has published articles in cultural media in the Arab world, such as Annahar and Assafir weeklies.

Her book Sense and Sadness, Syriac Chant in Aleppo was recently published with Oxford University Press. For a sample of Dr Jarjour’s academic writings, and contact information, see http://talajarjour.academia.edu/

I started questioning normative ideas of gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia during a casual excavation of my family archive. This fascination was compounded when I learned that my family history was anything but an anomaly during Imagined Malaysia’s project, “#TanpaPerkauman: The Road to Discrimination-Free Malaysia”, through which I interrogated much of the nationalistic, reductionist narratives I had internalised. While official histories have downplayed the region’s inherent hybridity and fluidity through rigid racial and gendered demarcations, my research assistantship with Sudarshana Chanda uncovered how interethnic families disrupted such categorisations in their lived experience. Inspired by these discoveries, my MPhil project at Cambridge aims to study how colonial subjects participated in the making and remaking of sexual and gender norms in contemporary Malaysia and Singapore through engaging with British Malaya’s incoherent legal regime that disciplined sexuality. I look forward to what are to be transformative interdisciplinary exchanges with fellow Gates Cambridge scholars as I begin my journey in writing inclusive social histories that shed light on the complexities of gendered experiences in Southeast Asia.

Previous Education

University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus Int. Relations with French 2022
Sunway College - 2019

Over the past few years I have worked with and founded educational institutions that provide students with opportunities to engage in hands-on democratic self-governance. As one deeply concerned about the decline of civic participation in developed democracies, these experiences have changed the way I think about political life and the way we prepare young people to take leadership in it. I am passionate about creating new ways to make civic education less rote and more experiential, and I am excited to explore possibilities for this innovation through the MPhil in Politics, Development, and Democratic Education at Cambridge. I hope to draw on this education in my future career: helping schools structurally integrate democratic practices into their administration and pedagogy, creating programs that give young people meaningful governance experience, and empowering students for lives of active civic engagement in their communities and world.

Marc Mierowsky is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is one of the editors of The Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (Cambridge UP, 2021) and co-editor with Nicholas Seager of Defoe’s Roxana for Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford UP, 2022). His monograph A Spy Amongst Us: Defoe’s Secret Service and the Campaign to End Scottish Independence is forthcoming with Yale University Press.

Links

https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/843332-marc-mierowsky

I grew up in suburban New Jersey as the son of immigrants from southern India. My father is from a small village called Pedapulivarru, which inspires my passion for health equity in underserved communities. Community service, which was central to my life growing up, showed me how similar disparities exist in the U.S. as well. Currently, I'm a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. At Cambridge, I studied the MPhil in Epidemiology and pursued my thesis research on the Impact of India's Community Health Workers on Antenatal and Infant Health. Prior to Cambridge, I received my BA in Molecular and Cellular Biology with a minor in Statistics from Harvard University. At Harvard, I published research on vaccination timing in Tanzania, led a global health advocacy organization, and directed national youth campaigns for the March of Dimes, a U.S.-based non-profit focused on preventing preterm birth.

Previous Education

Harvard University

I am an Associate Professor of Finance at the Department of FinTech, SKK Business School, Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU). Prior to joining SKKU in March 2023, I was an Associate Professor of Finance at Hanyang University between 2015 and 2023, and taught cadets as an army officer at the Korea Military Academy between 2012 and 2015.

My primary research interests are on the supply-side implications of institutional investors, particularly mutual funds. My other research areas include ESG, corporate governance, and FinTech.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge BA in Economics, MPhil in Economics 2008

Links

https://sites.google.com/view/jyjoh

I have always been interested in how government works and its potential for solving issues. As a public policy student at CIDE, a Mexican public social sciences think-tank, I delved into Mexican social policy and its conceptual underpinnings. Simultaneously, as a research assistant, I collaborated in research concerned with penitentiary and drug policy reform. After graduation, I became a lobbyist, gaining front row experience in Mexican politics. Despite working on different policy areas, including energy and fiscal policy, I felt I contributed the most by pushing for cannabis reform in partnership with activists, progressive politicians, and medical patients. Having completed my MPhil at Cambridge and worked as a policy analyst for the 2024 presidential pre-campaign of Marcelo Ebrard, former Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, as a PhD student I intend to explore the complex relationship between international law and public policy by studying if international human rights treaties prompted a cascade in social policy reform across Latin America. I am excited in becoming a member of the Gates Cambridge Community, and in the future, I intend to place a better understanding of policy determinants at the heart of government.

Previous Education

University of Cambridge Politics and International Stu 2022
CIDE Public Policy 2019

Aya M. Waller-Bey is a proud Detroiter and Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan where she also received her M.A. in Sociology in 2021. For undergrad, Aya attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., majoring in Sociology, graduating Cum Laude. After graduation, Aya remained at Georgetown working as an Admissions Officer and the Coordinator of Multicultural Recruitment in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. In 2015, she was awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship to the University of Cambridge in England—a scholarship awarded to only 40 people in the U.S. each year—and completed her Master of Philosophy in Education.

Aya has shared her insights on postsecondary access, diversity, and inclusion in op-eds in Forbes, Huffington Post U.K., University World News, and the 2016 White House Summit for Advancing Postsecondary Diversity and Inclusion. Her leadership and research have also been highlighted in a PBS Newshour special and the Cambridge Alumni Magazine, the Washington Post, and the University World News. She continued her commitment to access and inclusion through her work with national, not-for-profits and spoke with staffers on the Hill in September 2018 about advancing higher education policy that serves historically underrepresented college students. In March 2019, Aya discussed the experiences of historically disadvantaged students attending elite institutions as a panelist at SXSW Education in Austin, Texas.

Aya’s research on trauma narratives in college essays has also received national and local praise. In March 2020, Aya was selected as a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship awardee—a prestigious fellowship awarded by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine aimed to increase the diversity of the national college and university professoriate. Aya received an invitation from the Aspen Center for Physics Virtual Winter Conference 2021 to present her research at the winter conference. She was also one of 20 graduate students to receive the National Center for Institutional Diversity Anti-Racism Summer Research Grant for her dissertation project titled, “I didn’t want it to be a sob story”: Black Student Identity Narration in College Personal Statements” in 2021. She has presented her research at the University of Amsterdam, University of Florida Center for Public Interests Communication frank gathering, and symposiums at the University of Michigan.

Previous Education

Georgetown University