Recent awards from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies will support faculty-led research and international events, send graduate students to research destinations around the world and connect undergraduates with in-person and virtual internships from Ecuador to Zambia and beyond.

The Einaudi Center awarded seed grants, student travel grants and internships totaling $355,000 in the 2021–22 academic year.

“As pandemic travel restrictions loosen, our faculty and students alike have a pressing need to push forward their research plans,” said Rachel Beatty Riedl, the Einaudi Center’s director and John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and professor in the Department of Government (College of Arts and Sciences) and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. “We’re particularly thrilled to support international activities for faculty and students from across all Cornell colleges and schools during this time of urgency and demand.”

Both faculty-led activities and student internships highlight collaborations with the Einaudi Center’s extensive network of international partners, including universities and faculty experts, NGOs and practitioners partnering with Einaudi’s regional programs.

“Across the university, we have an ever-increasing awareness of the necessity of building bridges with our international partners to maximize the reach, impact and sustainability of our global activities,” Riedl said.

Faculty Awards

The Einaudi Center’s faculty funding opportunities include an annual cycle of seed grants to launch interdisciplinary research projects and underwrite conferences and other events. Funded projects primarily reflect Einaudi’s global research priorities, including inequalities, identities, and justice.

The 2021 cycle of seed funding bore fruit during this academic year. A research grant to Beth Lyon, clinical professor of law in Cornell Law School, jumpstarted a cross-disciplinary Cornell team’s work developing a xenophobia meter platform to track anti-foreigner speech on Twitter, a project co-funded with Global Cornell’s Migrations initiative.

A programming grant to Karim-Aly Kassam, International Professor of Environmental and Indigenous Studies (College of Agriculture and Life Sciences), funded an October 2021 climate conference that brought together Indigenous community members, scholars and policymakers to share knowledge and build local capacity.

2022 Research Grants

• Begüm Adalet (A&S): Transnational Theories
• Esra Akcan (College of Architecture, Art, and Planning): Intertwined Histories Lab
• Oumar Ba (A&S): Crimes, Against Humanity: Governing Global Justice
• Victoria Beard (AAP): Global Survey of City Leaders
• Jonathan Boyarin (A&S): Storm Still Blowin’: Critical Jewish Studies Now
• Mara Yue Du (A&S), with Cornell China Center: Racializing the Chinese Nation in Migrations and Revolutions
• Alexander Flecker (CALS): Building Collaborations to Understand Amazonian Aquaculture’s Environmental Footprint
• Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui (A&S): Gender, Justice, and Institutional Resilience in Post-Coup Guinea
• Sarah Kreps (A&S): How Communication about the COVID-19 Booster Affects Individual Behavior
• Wesley Sine (Cornell SC Johnson College of Business): Romani Entrepreneurship and Institutional Linkages
• Duanyi Yang (School of Industrial and Labor Relations), with CCC: Worker’s Voice in China’s Networked Public Sphere

2022 Programming Grants

Andrea Bachner (A&S) | Ernesto Bassi (A&S) | John Cawley (BPP) | Brian Dillon (SC Johnson) | Jenny Goldstein (CALS) |  Tejasvi Nagaraja (ILR)

Student Awards

The Einaudi Center’s student funding opportunities include popular spring semester awards of international research travel grants for graduate students and global summer internships for undergraduates.

2022 Travel Grants

Einaudi’s travel grants sponsor travel for graduate and professional students in all disciplines who plan to conduct research or fieldwork in international locations. This year’s 59 travel grant recipients will travel to destinations worldwide, from South America to Europe, Africa, Asia – and even Antarctica.

Roderick Wijunamai, a first-year PhD student in anthropology (A&S), says his travel grant will allow him to travel for the first time to the Mon district of Nagaland in northeastern India as he lays the groundwork for his project, Symbiotic Indigeneity and Shared Vulnerabilities in the Eastern Himalaya.

“I intend to spend at least a month getting to know the people and the place,” Wijunamai said. “Especially with the airfare hikes this year, I am very glad the Einaudi travel grant came through.”

Spring 2022 marks the largest group of travel grants Einaudi has awarded since the COVID-19 pandemic began interrupting travel. In addition, many recipients of Einaudi’s 2020 and 2021 travel grants have been able to use their awards in recent months as international travel restrictions loosened.

2022 Summer Internships

Einaudi internships connect Cornell undergraduates with faculty conducting international research and global practitioners partnering with the center’s regional programs.

Forty undergraduates will soon begin work in this summer’s global internships, with in-person positions in Ecuador and Africa and interns in other geographical regions working virtually. The interns will engage with experts in fields spanning international relations, climate and sustainability, global development, governance, education, and more.

Sheri Englund is senior associate director of communication for Global Cornell.