The International Relations and Political Science department is pleased to announce that five of its doctoral candidates have received prestigious awards to study abroad for the current academic year.

Merih Angin has been selected to receive the Swiss National Science Foundation's (SNSF) Doc.Mobility fellowship, as well as the Albert Gallatin Fellowship, and she will spend the next academic year in Georgetown University as a visiting scholar funded by the SNSF grant. She is a fourth year International Relations/Political Science PhD candidate. Her doctoral thesis focuses on principal-agent analysis of International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities.

Supported by a scholarship of the Swiss National Science Foundation, Janis Grzybowski will spend the upcoming academic year at the Erik Castrén Institute for International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki, renowned for its critical legal and interdisciplinary research. He is a fifth-year PhD student in political science, focusing his dissertation on the creation of states and in particular on the role social-science and legal knowledge play in grasping, constituting, and contesting emerging statehood.

Supported by a mobility fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, Ashley Thornton will be finishing her doctoral research under the auspices of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. Her research examines how policy makers frame welfare retrenchment proposals in New Zealand, France, and the United Kingdom using a content-analysis based methodology to reconstruct ideological frames.

Emily Wiseman is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Political Science. A recipient of the Doc.Mobility Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, she will be finishing her doctoral research this year as a Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Emily's Research examines how different international humanitarian organisations incorporate gender norms and gender mainstreaming policies within their organisations and then subsequently implement and operationalise them in the field in the wake of a rapid-onset natural disaster.

Ezgi Yildiz has been awarded with the Swiss National Science Foundation’s (SNSF) Doc.CH (HSS) fund for two years. She has also received a grant from the Danish National Science Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen, where she will spend the spring semester of 2014 as a visiting researcher. She is pursuing her PhD in the department of International Relations/Political Science. Her doctoral thesis investigates the evolution of human rights norms through judgments by the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee.

The Institute warmly congratulates these students for their accomplishments.