Students

Giovanna Cuillo

(International History and Politics)
 

Giovanna Cuillo is a PhD researcher in International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She completed an MPhil in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2023. Her dissertation, titled: ‘The Reconquista in the Discourse of Vox’ explored the memory of Al-Andalus in contemporary Spanish politics. She graduated from King’s College London in 2022, with a dissertation titled ‘The Permeability of Sexual Relations Boundaries in Medieval Iberia’. 
Her current PhD project explores the problematisation of the memory of Muslim Sicily within Italian political history, from the post-unification construction of national identity to contemporary debates on immigration, multiculturalism, and the position of Islam. Her research interests revolve around Italian and Spanish history and politics, migration and migration policies, multiculturalism and discrimination, the intersection of religion and politics, and the memory and politics of the past.
 

PhD title
The Legacy of Muslim Sicily in Italian Political History

Supervisor
Professor Davide Rodogno

Francesca Martens

(International History and Politics)
 

Francesca Marten’s academic background is in International History and Political studies. Her current research at the Graduate Institute explores Mapuche Girlhood during the dictatorship. Her academic journey, either through the Graduate Institute in Geneva (IHEID) or at El Colegio de México (COLMEX), revolves around Latin America, Gender Studies, Oral History and Colonial Switzerland. Her master thesis, « El testimonio de mi Madre», explores her mother’s memory of the Chilean dictatorship and her exile to Switzerland through oral history and the testimonial genre.

PhD title
Mapuche Girlhood during the Dictatorship

Supervisor
Nicole Bourbonnais

SHUYUE WANG

(Anthropology and Sociology)
 

Shuyue Wang is a second-year PhD student in Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute. Her research examines migration, displacement, and the social dynamics of Chinese tech workers in Silicon Valley, with a focus on themes such as social mobility, family dynamics, and cross-cultural interactions, exploring how their professional trajectories intersect with broader trends in global mobility. Her current fieldwork involves ethnographic studies on the immigration motivations of highly-skilled Chinese tech workers, their family dynamics between host and home countries, and the transformation of social capital and cultural practices in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a BA in Economics and Management from South China University of Technology and an MA in Anthropology from Columbia University, she applies interdisciplinary approaches to explore global migration patterns within the digital technology industry and their broader implications. She has worked with international organizations such as the United Nations Staff Union and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction to address issues related to international migration and global mobility. Additionally, she has experience in strategic development within China’s healthcare sector, focusing on internal mobility challenges.

PhD title
Transnational Mobility and Class Transformation: An Ethnographic Study of Chinese Tech Workers in Silicon Valley

Supervisor
Gregoire Mallard

Othman Belkebir

(Anthropology and Sociology)

Othman Belkebir is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. His research interests include migration and mobility issues, and he previously wrote a master's thesis on the Government of Refugees in Morocco. His current research lies at the intersection between political anthropology and the anthropology of migration, and focuses on the transformation of citizen and non-citizen mobility regimes in Morocco, which he explores through historical and anthropological lenses. This allows him to shed a light on how human mobility is constituted as a tool of public policy, as well as to explore the transnational politics of mobility and how they influence state practices and imaginaries.

Country of origin: Morocco

PHD Title
Governing mobilities: the case of Morocco

Supervisor
Alessandro Monsutti and Béatrice Hibou (Dir. of research, CNRS, CRI SciencesPo.)

Fekade Alemayhu Abebe

(International Law)

Fekade Alemayhu Abebe is  a third-year PhD candidate in international law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies from Ethiopia. He has  an LL.M in international humanitarian law and human rights from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and an LL.M in Public International Law from Addis Ababa University. Before coming to Geneva, he  served as a lecturer of law in two Ethiopian universities. His areas of interest include human rights of migrants, international humanitarian law, and broadly in Third World Approaches in International Law (TWAIL).

PHD Title
Searching for a Legal Framework: Missing Migrants in International Law

Supervisor
Professor Vincent Chetail

Jittawadee Chotinukul

(International Law)

Jittawadee Chotinukul is a PhD researcher in international law at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She previously served as research assistant and research collaborator at the Global Migration Centre (GMC). Prior to academia, Jittawadee worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Thailand on refugee status determination. She also has professional experience with a Geneva-based human rights NGO and an independent think tank in Singapore. She was a legal adviser in one of the leading law firms in Southeast Asia specialising in intellectual property. Jittawadee is a research affiliate at the Refugee Law Initiative (University of London), a member of the Asia-Pacific Research Group of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law (UNSW), and a member of the Global Strategic Litigation Council for Refugee Rights (Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and Cornell Law School). She is a qualified lawyer in Thailand..

PhD title
Rescuing the International Protection Regime: Towards Enhanced Supervision of International Law concerning Refugee Rights

Supervisor
Professor Vincent Chetail

Giuliano Beniamino Fleri

(International History and Politics)

Giuliano Fleri is a doctoral researcher at the Department of International History and Politics of the IHEID. His research interests include the history of migration in the central Mediterranean, the analysis of humanitarian/securitarian discourses and transnational region formation between Southern Europe and North Africa. Giuliano held an MA in Philosophy from the University of Catania. He has been research assistant for the UNHCR Records and Archives Section and the University of Manchester. He is currently an SNF Doc.Mobility fellow at the Insittut für Europäische Ethnologie at Humboldt University in Berlin. His latest article ‘The (Re)Birth of a Mediterranean Migraiton System. The Case of Tunisian Migration in Sicily’ has been published in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Title of the PHD : Supervisors:

PHD Title
A World with No Name. Migration, Identity and Transnational Bonds between Sicily and Tunisia. C. 1900-2000

Supervisors
Professor Davide Rodogno, Co-Supervisor: Professor Alessandro Monsutti

Aadarsh Gangwar

(ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY) 

Aadarsh's doctoral project concentrates on LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers, exploring discourses of “authentic” queerness within asylum systems and asylum seekers' practices of assembling credibility. His project makes a queer intervention that unsettles the centrality of truth and credibility assessment to asylum, and aspires to displace truthfulness, which is impossible to objectively ascertain and therefore easy to contest, as a virtue upon which the fates of asylum seekers hinge. Having joined the Department of Anthropology and Sociology in 2019, Aadarsh completed his master's degree in 2021 before starting his doctoral research. Prior to coming to Switzerland, he was studying, researching, and tutoring at Ashoka University in India. He keenly invites collaboration with scholars interested in gender and sexuality, especially in the context of migration and displacement.

PhD title
How to Pass as an “Authentic” Queer? Queer disruptions to truth and credibility assessment within (Swiss) asylum procedures

Supervisor
Professor Aditya Bharadwaj

Julia Auburn Greene

(IR and Political Science) 

Julia Auburn Greene, is a doctoral student in the International Relations/Political Science department. Her research interests include comparative migration studies, a path inspired by coursework during her MA at the Institute. Julia's dissertation seeks to explain the drivers of states' immigration policies and differences in legal treatment between immigrant groups by focusing on the perceptions of immigration in legislative debates. Prior to arriving at the Institute in 2018, she spent 4.5 years working at the intersection of food security and multilateralism with an international organization based in Bonn, Germany. She holds a BA in International Studies from Rhodes College.

PhD title
Varieties of Exclusion: Explaining the differing legal trajectories of immigrant groups

Supervisor
Professor David Sylvan

Franca Elena Kappes

(IR and Political Science)

Franca Elena Kappes, is a doctoral student at the International Relations and Political Science Department at the Graduate Institute. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of Critical Security Studies, Global Governance, International Political Sociology, and Migration and Diaspora Studies - with a regional focus on the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, her research focuses on nomad-state relationships, the impact of (stateless) diaspora groups on intra-state conflict and separatist movements, the role of non-state actors within (security) governance networks, and the consequences of regime complexity and institutional overlap. She holds a Master’s degree in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute and a BA in Political Science from the Free University Berlin."

PhD title
Preliminary dissertation title is as follows: "Cyber-Hobos, Stateless War Machines, and Diasporic Rhizomes: Mapping Nomadic Entanglements in a (post)Westphalian World".

Supervisor
Professor Anna Leander

Taehoon Lee

(International Economics)

Taehoon Lee is a PhD candidate in Development Economics and a consultant at the Migration Research Division in IOM. He holds a Master in Economics from Paris School of Economics, France and a BSc in Economic Theory and Statistics from New York University, USA. He worked as a research assistant and a research associate at nccr – on the move in Geneva and Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo, respectively.

PhD title:
Three essays in Economics of Migration

Supervisor
Professor Martina Viarengo

Irene Magnanini

(International Law)

Irene Magnanini (she/her) is a PhD candidate in International Law at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, where she was awarded a full scholarship to research on the application of queer theories to the international migration law framework. Prior to that, she worked in different capacities with IOM in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bangladesh and with UNHCR in Italy. Other relevant work experiences include having been a Legal Assistant with the NGO European Lawyers in Lesvos, an Advocacy Intern with Franciscans International in Geneva and a Volunteers' Coordinator for the intercultural organization AFS in Reykjavík. She holds a Master's Degree in International Law from the Graduate Institute and a Bachelor's in International Relations from the University of Trieste. Irene considers herself a queer activist who contributes to a common aim through her research activity.

PhD title
Queering International Migration Law

Supervisor
Professor Vincent Chetail

Shriya Patnaik

(International History and Politics)

Shriya Patnaik is a PhD candidate at the Department of International History and Politics, where her research is funded by the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship. Her research focuses on the historical genealogy surrounding discourses related to prostitution, trafficking, and sex-worker rights in colonial and postcolonial India. In particular, she focuses on the now-extinct matriarchal community of temple-dancers called Mahari-Devadasis in the state of Odisha (a matrilineal community categorized as ‘religious prostitutes’ in colonial India), along with their legal and healthcare rights under international humanitarian conventions. Her research is methodologically reliant on oral histories, colonial-period archival records, along with UN/ILO humanitarian conventions on the rights of marginalised communities in the Global South. Shriya has pursued her Bachelor's in History from Cornell University, and has subsequently pursued her Masters' in International History with a focus on Gender Studies from the Columbia University-London School of Economics dual degree MA-MSc program. Besides her academic interests, she has actively worked in the public policy and NGO/development sectors in India on gender and human rights initiatives, and these experiences have played a crucial role in shaping her research focus on women’s rights and civil society movements at a transnational scale. She is also a PhD affiliate with the Graduate Institute Gender Centre, and has worked as a research scholar with the Swiss Network of International Studies.

PhD Title
Re-constructing and Re-imagining the Matriarchal Community of Devadasis: Gender, Subalternity and Human Rights Projects in Postcolonial India (1947-2015)

Supervisor
Professor Nicole Bourbonnais

Malavika Rao

(International Law)
 

Malavika Rao  is a PhD Candidate in International Law at the Graduate Institute Geneva. She also worked as a Teaching Assistant in the International Law Department at the Graduate Institute Geneva from 2019-2021. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the application of the principle of non-refoulement in international law to instances of food deprivation. Her areas of interest include international migration law and international environmental law, with a focus on the issues of starvation and climate change. Prior to joining the PhD program, Malavika worked as a Utility Justice Legal Fellow at The Utility Reform Network in San Francisco (TURN) from 2017-2018. She received her LLM in Environmental Law and Energy Law & Clean Technology from the University of California Berkeley in 2017. She has a BA.LLB (Hons.) from Christ University, Bangalore, India.

PhD title
Food Deprivation and Non-Refoulement in International Law

Supervisor
Professor Vincent Chetail

Sucharita Sengupta

(Anthropology and Sociology)
 

Sucharita Sengupta is a PhD candidate at the department of Anthropology and Sociology in the Graduate Institute of Geneva, from 2017. She works under the supervision of Professor Alessandro Monsutti, on the quest to belong and resistance against exclusion, by ‘stateless' people through the case study of Rohingya refugees in camps of Bangladesh. The work intends to explore belonging, agency and resilience of people devoid of statehood or citizenship and inquire into existing categories within refugee studies through that based on her field work in the camps. The research through the empirical data will like to investigate debates on the anthropology of state and how modern governance is conceived through borders and mobility. The study will also attempt to analyse how through the production of new and changing social relations the Rohingya refugees are able to challenge the classical understanding of belonging, and citizenship. In this kind of a survival, precarity is the new normal, when everyday hardship is marked by waiting and hopes to gain access to new forms of citizenship rights to evade socio-economic vulnerabilities and political stamping out.

PhD Title
To wait to Belong?: The Rohingya in the refugee camps of Bangladesh.

Supervisor
Professor Alessandro Monsutti

Gina Wirz-Suárez

(Anthropology and Sociology)
 

Gina Wirz-Suárez is PhD candidate in ANSO at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. She holds a Master’s in Social Sciences from the University of Lausanne. She also completed a bachelor's in Political Science and a Master's in Gender Studies at the National University of Colombia. She is interested in social movements, gender studies, and forced migration studies. For her MA thesis at UNIL, she analysed the case study of the transnational participation of Colombian women in exile. She focused on the actions towards the last peace process in Colombia. She highlighted how the lack of refugee status recognition hindered their access to political participation. For her doctoral thesis, she plans to delve into the transnational political participation of Colombian women in exile through a multi-sited ethnography. Specifically, she is interested in; i) how women define themselves as political activists and ii) how immigration regimes and the social-political contexts enable or constraint their transnational activism.

PhD title
Women in exile: A multi-sited ethnography of transnational activism

Supervisor
Professor Graziella Moraes Da Silva