Perry World House Welcomes 2021-22 Postdoctoral Fellows

Perry World House, the University of Pennsylvania’s global affairs hub, has announced its class of Postdoctoral Fellows for the 2021-22 academic year. As the university prepares to return to full in-person learning, Perry World House has decided to extend the fellowships of 5 members of the 2020-21 cohort and invite three new Fellows.  The full class includes emerging scholars dedicated to policy-relevant research on some of today’s most important global issues. 

“Since Perry World House’s creation, our Postdoctoral Fellows have made a huge contribution to the Penn community before going on to advance research and education of students at some of the most well-regarded institutions in the world,” said Michael Horowitz, Director of Perry World House and Richard Perry Professor. “We are delighted that so many of last year’s cohort will return to enjoy the full Perry World House experience on campus after a year of working remotely and look forward to welcoming new fellows this year.”

The 2021-22 Perry World House Postdoctoral Fellows are (an asterisk indicates a returning fellow):

Bailee Donahue will work with Beth Simmons, the Andrea Mitchell University Professor in Law, Political Science and Business Ethics, on Perry World House’s Borders and Boundaries Project, which examines how political life both affects and is affected by border security policies. Donahue’s research interests are at the intersection of political economy and peace research. She will receive her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this spring. In addition, Donahue holds an M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College.

Michael Franczak* is a historian of American foreign policy and the global economy. His articles have appeared in a number of academic and popular outlets including Diplomatic History, Cold War History, Foreign Policy, and Boston Review. Franczak’s first book, North-South: Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, will be released in 2022 by Cornell University Press. Before coming to Perry World House, he was a Henry Chauncey ’57 Postdoctoral Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University, where he also taught in the Department of History. He earned his Ph.D. from Boston College and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.

Shae A.C. Frydenlund* is a feminist geographer concerned with the translocal political economy of forced displacement. This year, she will work with both Perry World House and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies/The Alice Paul Center. Funded by the National Science Foundation, Frydenlund’s research focuses on social reproduction, racial capitalism, and refugee livelihoods. Her book project, Support from the South: Refugee Labor and Capitalist Development, analyzes the relationship between unpaid refugee work, racialized labor, and urban prosperity.  She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Colorado Boulder, and a B.A. from Colgate University.

Meg K. Guliford* is a Penn Vice-Provost Postdoctoral Fellow in residence at Perry World House. Her academic research centers on questions related to political violence, external intervention, and U.S. foreign policy and has been supported by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Eisenhower Institute. Guliford began her career as Presidential Management Fellow for Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, she also served as an analyst for the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and worked as a researcher for the Institute for Defense Analyses. Guliford will receive her Ph.D. from Tufts University. She earned her M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Richard J. McAlexander* is also working with Professor Simmons on the Borders and Boundaries Project. His primary interests are in political violence, terrorism, nonviolent resistance, imperialism, and the evolution of international borders. McAlexander’s book project, The Politics of Anticolonial Resistance: Violence, Nonviolence and the Erosion of Empire, studies how the British Empire responded to different forms of resistance in its colonies. McAlexander received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and holds an M.A. from Temple University and a B.S. from Drexel University.

Andrea Restrepo-Mieth’s* work combines insights from urban planning and political science to improve the equitable and sustainable provision of local public goods and basic services in cities and metropolitan areas in the Global South. Professionally, Restrepo-Mieth has consulted for the World Bank, worked as a researcher for the Center for Sustainable Asian Cities (Singapore) and held short-term positions at UN-Habitat in Laos and the Asian Development Bank in Cambodia. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, a M.P.P. from the Lee Kuan Yew School, National University of Singapore, and a B.A. from State University of New York at New Paltz.

Theo Milonopoulos’s research on wartime decision-making has been supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation’s World Politics & Statecraft Fellowship and the America in the World Predoctoral Fellowship at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously held research assistant and intern positions at the RAND Corporation, the Center for New American Security, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and the Hoover Institution, where he served as a lead research assistant to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as she wrote her memoirs. A graduate of Stanford University, Milonopoulos received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.A. at King's College London, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar.

Sara Plana is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a pre-doctoral fellow at the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for the 2020-2021 academic year. Her book project examines how states control non-state armed groups they sponsor in foreign civil wars through in-depth, multi-method case studies of state-proxy relationships in the Syrian civil war from 2011 to present. She is a Fellow with the Bridging the Gap Project, a non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a co-founder of the Future Strategy Forum. She graduated with an A.B. from Harvard University.