The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies has awarded seed grants to three faculty members to support new collaborative research efforts on international topics, and small grants to three more to help fund conferences, workshops or other activities. 

Seed grants provide up to $10,000; small grants are capped at $5,000.

Seed-grant recipients are:

• Kati Griffith, associate professor of labor and employment law, School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR): “Labor Rights Across Borders: Examining the Experiences of Haitian and Central American Migrants.” Griffith and ILR colleague Shannon Gleeson will interview immigrants in the New York City area to explore the role of “often arbitrary and unstable immigration policies in shaping migrant worker experiences in a globalized economy.”
• Valerie Hans, professor of law, Cornell Law School: “A New Jury System at Work.” Hans and researchers at Argentina’s Instituto de Estudios Comparados en Ciencias Penales y Sociales (Institute for the Comparative Study of Penal and Social Sciences) will conduct interviews and focus groups with judges, lawyers and jurors in the world’s newest jury system – in the Argentine province of Neuquén.
• Lori Khatchadourian, associate professor of Near Eastern studies, College of Arts and Sciences: “Life in the Ruins: An Archaeology of Socialist Modernity.” Khatchadourian plans to conduct preliminary archaeological and ethnographic research in “the rotting remnants of Soviet industrialization” in Armenia.

Small-grant recipients:

• Raymond Craib, professor of history, College of Arts and Sciences: “Labor, State, Capital: Historical Materialism, Metanarratives and the Revival of Explanatory Frameworks.” Craib plans to work with history department graduate students Kyle Harvey and Joshua Savala, the Einaudi Center and the Latin American Studies Program to host a conference on Latin America in historical perspective in May 2019.
• Mostafa Minawi, associate professor of history, College of Arts and Sciences: “The Middle East in Africa/Africa in the Middle East.” Minawi plans to bring together graduate students and junior faculty from a range of disciplines for a workshop to discuss their research into the “deep and wide connections between sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.”
• Margarita Tsoutsoura, associate professor of finance, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business: “Exposing Corruption: Labor Reallocation after Exposure of Corrupt Firms.” Tsoutsoura and colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh and Northwestern University will study the performance of Brazilian firms that are found to have benefited from local government favoritism to untangle the causes of “large and persistent differences in productivity” among companies.

Jonathan Miller is associate director for communications at the Einaudi Center.