Fellows

Fellows 2025-2026

Sahar Bostock (History, Columbia University)
Agrarian Studies Program Fellow
Sahar Bostock is a historian of science, technology, and the environment in the modern Middle East, specializing in the history of Palestine/Israel. She received her PhD in History from Columbia University and is currently a Postdoctoral Associate with the Program in Agrarian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Her research explores how urban planning, transportation networks, and agricultural schemes shaped everyday life in the desert and mediated interactions between Ottoman and British imperial actors; Palestinian Bedouin, fellahin, and urbanites; and Zionist settlers. Her current book project, Desert Developmentalism, examines how infrastructural and agricultural initiatives—and their disintegration and destruction—transformed both material landscapes and colonial politics in Southern Palestine over the century leading to Israeli independence and Palestinian statelessness. Drawing on archival, published, and visual sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, and English, alongside interviews with members of Bedouin communities, her work demonstrates how shifting ideas about deserts and desert-dwellers interacted with material infrastructure to reshape the environment, its people, and its imagined futures. Sahar’s doctoral research was supported by the Social Science Research Council and Zeit Stiftung Bucerius.

Sahar’s previous research investigated Palestinian radio listening practices under the British Mandate, as well as listeners’ discourse on the Palestine Broadcasting Service (1936-1948). Her article “Radio Listenership in Palestinian Society: Reshaping Cultural Practices and Political Debate under the British Mandate, 1930–1948” was published in Contemporary Levant. Before moving to the United States, Sahar worked as an Arabic instructor, developed digital materials for teaching Arabic and Hebrew, and promoted the study of spoken Arabic in schools, universities, and private institutions in Israel.

Neel Thakkar (History, Princeton University)
Agrarian Studies Program Fellow
Neel Thakkar is an historian of modern South Asia with interests in economic, environmental, and political history, and Adivasi (‘Indigenous’) Studies. His dissertation argued that twentieth-century development was an avenue for creative projects of alternative world-making. Through a focus on the Chota Nagpur plateau, a mineral-rich region in eastern India that bore the brunt of India’s experiment with economic planning, his work demonstrates that elites and subalterns alike engaged with the concept of development to theorize, organize around, and contest competing visions of modernity. Prior to joining the Program in Agrarian Studies, Neel studied at Princeton University and at Stanford University. Neel has also published on the history of ‘developmentalism’ in colonial Africa, and remains interested in the thematic linkages between South Asia and the globe around questions of empire and decolonization, capitalism and development, and indigeneity. 

Juan Wilson (History, University of Chicago)
Agrarian Studies Program Fellow
Juan C. Wilson is a legal historian whose research explores the intersection of economic development, human rights, and authoritarianism. His current project examines the first social revolution of the twentieth century—the Mexican Revolution—to address a paradox common to many such upheavals: why policies aimed at redistributing land, pro-tecting workers, and promoting industrialization often gave rise to authoritarian governance practices that resembled those of the regimes they sought to overthrow.

Juan holds a PhD in History from the University of Chicago (2025) and an LLB/BA in Social Sciences from Universidad de Chile (2014). Before moving to the United States, he taught courses on Property, Contracts, and Legal History at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile. He also worked on international arbitration cases as a clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Enrique Barros Bourie. His research has been published in Latin American Le-gal Studies, Nexos, and Tocqueville 21.

Maryam Aslany
Visiting Researcher (Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow)
Maryam Aslany has a background in economic sociology and political economy. At Yale, her research will explore how forms of social stratification (class, ethnicity, caste, race, religion, and gender) impact the experience of ecological crisis, and generate differential adaptation strategies, in Indian agrarian society. Maryam is the author of Contested Capital (Cambridge University Press: 2020), a book on the rise of India’s rural middle classes, as well as Peasants (Bloomsbury, Knopf: 2026), which will describe the crisis of the global countryside. Maryam holds a PhD in Economic Sociology from King’s College London (2018) and an MSc in Indian studies from University of Oxford (2013). Her doctoral research examined the class structure of the Indian countryside, and identified a large but previously neglected group – the rural middle class – whose material conditions and social aspirations were markedly different from its better-known urban counterpart. Following her doctorate, she conducted a collaborative study of the political economy of climate-change adaptation in Fiji, which was funded by the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. In 2019, she joined Wolfson College, University of Oxford, as a postdoctoral researcher and Junior Research Fellow, where she continued her research on climate-change adaptation, with a comparative perspective on India.

From 2020 to 2022, Maryam was a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where she worked on a large-scale EU-funded research project concerning youth and future migration from West Africa. Her current book, Peasants, will offer a portrait of the world through four conspicuous commodities: rice, sugarcane, cocoa and coca. Based on extensive fieldwork, this ongoing project will provide an empirically based and comprehensive portrait of the crisis confronting the global peasantry in the neoliberal era.

Maryam has lived and conducted research among rural communities in India, Fiji, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Kenya, Ghana, Cape Verde, and The Gambia. Her research interests include: comparative agrarian political economy, peasant politics, agrarian transition, climate-induced migration, and theories of class. Her research is primarily based on mixed methods for handling large national data sets, quantitative field evidence, qualitative case material and social profiles.

Michał Pospiszyl
Visiting Fellow (History, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Michał Pospiszyl is a historian and assistant professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who lives in the Białowieża Forest. Dr. Pospiszyl’s current research focuses on the environmental dimensions of migration, resistance, and imperial expansion in Eastern Europe during the Enlightenment. The current book project on "escape ecologies" in Enlightenment Eastern Europe examines how landscapes, natural resources, and environmental opacity enabled large-scale movements of peasants, deserters, and religious minorities into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during a period often described as one of political and economic collapse.    

Sheng Long
Affiliate Fellow (Anthropology, Council on East Asian Studies, Yale MacMillan Center)
Sheng Long’s work focuses on numerical governance: how people quantify farmland, vegetation, and weather in ways that resonate with urban-rural development disparities and social stratification in statistical engagement. Her first manuscript project, Numbering Land: Ethical Measures of Geography and Subjectivity in Agrarian Reforms, is an ethnography of geographic and legal data in national reforms and everyday agriculture. It examines the contribution and vulnerability of rural landholders in the state’s statistical governance of land belonging and agrarian resources. The work thematizes numbers as an unsettling actor in both routine life and techno-scientific projects, questioning the power dynamics in technologies invented by government and giant corporations.

Manoel Rendeiro Neto
Affiliate Fellow (History, Yale University)
Manoel Rendeiro (he/his/him) holds a B.A. and a teaching degree in History from the University of Brasília, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of California, Davis, with a specialization in African Diaspora Studies. Currently, Manoel is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of History and Affiliate Fellow at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. Beginning in the fall of 2026, Manoel will assume the position of Assistant Professor of Colonial Latin American History at Yale University.

Manoel's research focuses on the role of environmental knowledge in empire-building, ethno-racial stratification, and autonomous territorialization in the emergence of an Afro-Indigenous Amazon. Besides working on his book manuscript "Imperial Tides, Runaway Rivers: Cultivating Knowledge, Labor, and Sovereignty in the Atlantic Amazon (1750-1850),” he is developing articles related to waterscape engineering interventions and slavery in 18th century French Guiana; and Indigenous Amazonian women’s role as commercial agents on inter-village trade of domestic produce during Portuguese colonization. His research has been supported by the Conference on Latin American History, the Dumbarton Oaks in conjunction with the Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Luso-American Development Foundation, UC Humanities Research Institute, among others.

Born and raised in the Brazilian Amazon, Manoel is committed to research projects on traditional Afro-Indigenous Amazonian communities and their histories to foster the development of growing interdisciplinary studies about the largest rainforest in the world from a transimperial historical perspective from early modern times to present day challenges.

Catherine Tsai
Affiliate Fellow (History, Council on East Asian Studies, Yale MacMillan Center)
Catherine Tsai is a historian of modern Japan, with an interest in the colonial and postwar experiences of Taiwanese and Okinawans. Her dissertation focuses on the agrarian development of the Yaeyama Islands, the southernmost archipelago of Okinawa, under Japanese empire and American Occupation. It argues that both Japanese and American metropolitan desires for tropical products not only prompted the exploration and exploitation of the islands’ resources, but also reshaped the economic and environmental landscape to create a specific form of tropicality modeled after Taiwan. Catherine received her Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University (2025). She received a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Relations from the University of California, Davis. Her work has received the support of the Japan Foundation, the Center for Chinese Studies (Taiwan), and the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard.