The Urban Doctoral Fellows program provides a yearlong writing and professionalization experience for up to 10 University of Chicago doctoral students whose research focuses on urban issues. Students may come from any department or School at the University of Chicago; they may also be in any year of their PhD. Learn more.
Alexa Cinque
Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Alexa Cinque is a doctoral student at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Her research focuses on the carceral system, system-impacted communities, and the interplay of decarceration policy and transformative justice practices. This work emphasizes the expertise and centrality of community stakeholders in developing policy and community-based approaches to reducing system impact and community harm through community-engaged research. She has previous experience working on legal defense mitigation, data-driven prosecutorial policy implementation, and court-based research and policy advocacy. Alexa also holds an AM in social work from Crown, as well as a BA in psychology from the University of Michigan.
Ronit Ghosh
South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC) and Music
Ronit Ghosh is a joint-PhD candidate in the departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC) and Music at The University of Chicago. He is an ethnomusicologist and cultural historian of modern South Asia. His doctoral dissertation deploys ethnographic, archival, and media-archaeological methods to demonstrate how studio cultures and flows of sound technologies vis-à-vis radio, gramophone, and film are essential to making visible caste, class, and gender politics in Bengali song making. Drawing on the interdisciplinarity of sound studies, he brings the micro-politics of sound-work in recording studios in conversation with the macro-politics of urban governmentality and ideas of cosmopolitanism in late- and postcolonial Bengal, India. His broader research interests include post-/decolonial studies, critical theory, gender and caste studies, the anthropology of media, music and religion, and urban soundscapes. Prior to joining the doctoral program, he earned master’s degrees in media studies from Humboldt University in Berlin and English from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.
Devin Green
Political Science
Devin Green is a second-year doctoral student in Political Science at the University of Chicago. His broad interests are in the study of organizing, the carceral state, and corporate power. His undergraduate thesis, which received the Turner award for best senior thesis in Political Science, explored partnerships between environmental organizers and corporations to unpack the circumstances producing unlikely coalitions in political arenas. As a Mansueto Urban Doctoral Fellow, Devin will study the relationship between corporations, non-profits, and police departments to understand the role of private actors in shaping urban criminal justice politics. He holds a B.A in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University and is the recipient of multiple competitive fellowships, including the American Political Science Association’s Diversity Fellowship and the University of Chicago Neubauer Fellowship.
Nikki Grigg
Anthropology
Nikki Grigg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her research explores the contradictions of citizenship and how urban residents fashion alternative forms of power and belonging. Her current project uses archaeology to examine how immigrant and migrant Washingtonians shaped U.S. citizenship in the nation’s capital in the decades following the Civil War. Nikki has worked on archaeological excavations and collections management in D.C., Virginia, and England and as a volunteer and intern with the D.C. Historic Preservation Office. She holds a B.A. in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.
Emma Heidorn
Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Emma Heidorn is a doctoral student at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Her primary area of interest is child and adolescent mental health, with a particular focus on newcomer refugee and immigrant well-being. She is interested in trauma-informed practices in schools and the development of pragmatic, novel, and culturally relevant school-based psychosocial supports in lower-resource settings. She is also interested in the social and environmental determinants of youth mental health and well-being, specifically within the urban space. Emma received an AM in Social Work from the University of Chicago and a BA in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She has worked as a teacher in the Middle East and a school-based clinical social worker in Chicago.
Hyunku Kwon
Sociology
Hyunku Kwon is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago. He studies political economy, race, and the environment in the Postbellum US South, with a focus on agricultural land use arrangements, labor contracts and cotton. His dissertation project examines the role that Black federal troops played in shaping land use (e.g., plantations, sharecropping, etc.) and crop monoculture in the Postbellum US South. His research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review and Sociological Science. Before joining the University of Chicago, he received a BA in Public Administration and Political Science from Yonsei University.
Nina Olney
Sociology
Nina Olney is a current PhD student in Sociology, studying how notions of land vacancy and productivity change in the afterlife of adaptive reuse projects, particularly in relation to environmental remediation. Nina’s previous work focused on the ways in which climate planning draws on racialized aesthetics of urban green space to enable environmental gentrification. With a background in economics and sustainable architecture, Nina approaches these research questions with a mix of qualitative and critical spatial methodology in order to better understand the spatial logics of dispossession and cycles of de/revalorization related to urban greening.
Fern Ramoutar
Economics
Fern Ramoutar is a 6th year PhD Candidate in Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her research uses tools from applied microeconomics and industrial organization to study housing and urban inequality. Fern holds a BA in Economics and International Relations from the University of Toronto and an MA in Economics from the University of British Columbia. Beyond academia, she is committed to supporting mutual aid networks and local community organizing in Chicago.
Goya Razavi
Harris School of Public Policy
Goya Razavi is a PhD candidate at the Harris School of Public Policy. His research focuses on improving the understanding of the determinants of socio-economic inequality. Building on rich administrative datasets and econometric methods, his research provides new insights on the long-run consequences of public policies. Prior work has focused on the role of neighborhood sorting in shaping differences in educational quality and the long-term socio-economic trajectories of children. In ongoing work, he examines the potential of higher education to enhance intergenerational mobility among students from disadvantaged backgrounds, aiming to inform optimal admission policies. Goya holds a BSc in Economics and an MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Aaron Stagoff-Belfort
Sociology
Aaron Stagoff-Belfort is a sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and a Research Assistant for the UChicago Justice Project. His research interests lie at the intersection of policing and the criminal legal system, urban sociology, and race-class inequality. He uses mixed methods to advance two related research agendas. The first investigates how policing might effect socioeconomic wellbeing and health, particularly the role policing plays in producing inequality and stratification. The second explores approaches to building safer neighborhoods without relying on punitive social control mechanisms. Both bodies of work consider the role of community and state institutions in providing security and how institutions outside of the legal system can build social cohesion and enhance community safety. Prior to coming to the University of Chicago, he worked as a Program Associate in the Redefining Public Safety Program at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City. He received a Bachelor of Arts in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.