Livio Silva-Muller, Researcher at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy (AHCD) and Ph.D. Candidate at the Anthropology and Sociology Department, was selected to join the Harvard Academy Scholars program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Selection to The Harvard Academy is highly competitive, with acceptance rates typically ranging from about 1% to 2%. 

The program identifies and supports outstanding scholars at the start of their academic careers whose works combine excellence in a social science discipline with a command of the language and knowledge or expertise of countries or regions.

 As a Harvard Academy Scholar, Livio will work on different projects. First, he will extend his dissertation, “The Amazon as a Global Carbon Sink”, into a book that unpacks how Latin American countries have worked to stop deforestation in the largest Rainforest of the world. Livio will also continue to work closely with Prof. Graziella Moraes Silva on a book about Elites and the Politics of Redistribution in the Global South hosted at AHCD. Finally, connecting both topics, Livio will start a new project on how economic elites leverage varied transnational ties to stop decarbonization and redistribution.

We asked Livio a few questions about his journey so far:

What were the most significant moments of your Ph.D at the Graduate Institute, and how did this experience prepare you for the next steps in your academic journey?

I did both my master’s and my Ph.D at the Institute. I would say that the transdisciplinary nature of the institute was extremely important because it allowed me to get more varied methodological training and meet faculty in other departments. My project never fit neatly within one discipline or method. I had support from friends in economics, international history, and IRPS that were key in my journey. And then, a bit contradictorily, getting unmatched sociological supervision from Graziella and Gregoire at the Anthropology and Sociology Department was very important to situate my work in a concrete tradition.

During your Ph.D, you worked as a Research Assistant for five years on a project led by Graziella Moraes Silva at AHCD. How did your participation in collective projects and your affiliation with the Centre enrich your research and academic experience?

The Centre was my primary home for all these years. In terms of the research we conducted, working in a different country (South Africa) and leveraging different methods (Surveys) helped me understand my own case study and methods better. This is generally true for most things at AHCD because we are constantly exposed to different ways of thinking about similar issues. I also benefited multiple times from feedback on my work from a variety of scholars. Reading Hirschman every now and then also helped me understand myself as a scholar of development, something that became quite prominent in my papers over time.

What advice would you give to current PhD students at the Institute who are considering an international academic career?

I will repeat advice that Graziella gave me early on: during your Ph.D, you are still a student, so you should learn new things. I interpreted that as a free pass to read very broadly and learn new methods. If you are stuck with one kind of data, one kind of method, and one kind of way of seeing the world, you are probably doing something wrong.