Fellows
Fellows 2026-2027
Postdoctoral Associates
Conor Wilkinson (History, Columbia University)
Joshua Linkous (History and East Asian Languages, Harvard University)
Visiting Fellows
Petra Kuivala
Visiting Fellow (Assistant Professor of Global Christianity, University of Eastern Finland)
Affiliate Fellows
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 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.
Graduate Affiliate Fellows
Sergio Infante is a Ph.D. candidate in Global History at Yale University. His current research examines the relationships between the social sciences, economic development, and antipoverty programs, with a special focus on twentieth-century South America. He is writing a history of the “informal sector” and “informal economy” as concepts. His work touches on several themes that concern historians of the recent past, such as transnational migration, gig work, population growth, technocracy, democracy, and the Cold War.
Sergio received a B.A. in History from Yale College in 2018 and an M.Phil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2019. He is a recipient of the P.D. Soros “New Americans” Fellowship, the Beinecke Fellowship of the Sperry Fund, the Charles and Julia Henry Fellowship, and most recently, the History of Economics Society’s Young Scholars Award. Before enrolling at Yale, Sergio was an editor at Foreign Affairs Magazine.
Gabriel Rivera Cotton is a Combined Ph.D. student in History and African American Studies. His research focuses on the history of slavery in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. He is particularly interested in enslaved people's resistance and inter-Caribbean networks of information and movement. More widely, he is interested in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin American History, Digital Humanities, and Caribbean literature. Gabriel received his B.A. in History with a Minor in French from the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras.
Graduate Coordinator
Shalini Iyengar
Anthropology, Yale University
Agrarian Studies Program Fellowships
The Agrarian Studies Program appoints visiting fellows annually who are in residence for the year, present a paper, and attend the colloquia. This year the Program has three Program Fellows. The diversity of the fellows reflects the breadth of the program. We also encourage applications from knowledgeable “activists” and “public intellectuals” whose work on rural life transcends the academy. Fellows are selected competitively. Link to Agrarian Studies Program Fellowships
Agrarian Studies Archives
Colloquium schedules and other information about Agrarian Studies programs and events from past years are available in the Link to Archives page