Fellows

Fellows 2024-2025

Postdocs

Matthew Ghazarian (MESAAS, Columbia University)

Agrarian Studies Program Fellow

Matthew Hagop Ghazarian works on social history, political economy, and political ecology in the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. He is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. from Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and an A.B. in Government from Harvard University. His current research focuses on ethnic divides, rural life, and famine in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Following new social visions in tandem with re-organizations of food, capital, and land, his work traces their interplay at key moments to show how rigid notions of social difference gained currency among rural people. His work brings together social, economic, and environmental history to explain the development of these increasingly conflict-prone social categories, which would become the fault lines for violence and partition at the end of empire.

Ghazarian’s other work has examined marriage, sex, and violence in the late Ottoman Empire as well as histories of technology and infrastructure in the neighboring South Caucasus. He has also been a member of the editors collective of Ottoman History Podcast since 2015 and has produced episodes in English and Turkish on topics ranging from Ottoman history, Islamic thought, Armenian Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. He has taught in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Armenian Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Program on Environmental Science & Policy at Smith College.

Dixita Deka (Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences)

Agrarian Studies Program Fellow

Dixita Deka is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. She is an interdisciplinary researcher from Assam, India. With her BA and MA degrees in Political Science from Cotton College and Gauhati University, she has completed her MPhil (2017) and PhD (2021) in Social Sciences from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati Campus, India. Her MPhil dissertation focused on the gender dynamics of insurgent organizations in Northeast India, particularly the oral histories of women insurgents in Assam. Her PhD explored the politics of memorializing militarization in Assam in the 1990s and examined the symbiotic relationship between power and violence based on ethnographic narratives. Before joining Yale, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the North Eastern Social Research Centre (NESRC), Guwahati where she worked in a project on food sovereignty in the Eastern Himalayas funded by the Swedish Research Council. During the project, she carried her fieldwork in Northeast India, Bangladesh, and Nepal’s Mount Everest Region. Her first book, Seeds and Food Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences (2023), is a co-authored, open access book written with her project team and the community. At Yale, she plans to expand her research on food sovereignty exploring the functioning of farming cooperatives in Northeast India.

Dixita’s writings are published by Zubaan, Asian Ethnicity, Economic & Political Weekly, Raiot, Seminar, The India Forum, Biblio, The Daily Star, Frontline, LSE Review of Books, South Asia @LSE blog amongst others. She is the recipient of the Zubaan-Sasakawa Peace Foundation Grant for Young Researchers from Northeast India (2019), the Annual VMMF-IAWS Young Research Scholars Award (2020), South Asia Speaks Fellow (2022), and the Cultivating the Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) grant from the Association for Asian Studies (2024) for her book project Underground Women. Dixita’s current interest has been exploring collaborations with visual artists for disseminating her research. She is a member of the Roots & Bridges Collective, which has been organizing an annual ethnography writing workshop since 2014 for PhD scholars particularly from Northeast India researching the region.

Yuan Gao (History, Case Western Reserve University)

Agrarian Studies Program Fellow

Yuan Gao is an Assistant Professor of Chinese History at Case Western Reserve University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University in 2024. Prior to that, she received M.A. in Eurasian studies at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Yuan is an environmental historian of northwestern China and Central Eurasia. Her research focuses on the intersection of empires, economic extraction, and environment, with a particular emphasis on the Eurasian borderlands of Qing China and imperial Russia. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Tigers and Locusts: Environmental Changes in Late Qing Xinjiang. Through the extinction of Caspian tigers and recurring locust plagues, this project tells stories of environmental changes in Xinjiang under Qing rule in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Moreover, by situating this arid region globally, Yuan argues that the environment of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang played a pivotal role in shaping the global discourse on arid land, desiccation, and the intricate relationship between humans and nature. Yuan’s research is supported by fellowships and grants from Georgetown University, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, UNESCO Silk Roads Youth Program, the Cosmos Club, and OYCF-Chow Fellowships.

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.

Graduate Affiliate Fellows

Christian Espinosa Schatz (Anthropology and School of the Environment, Yale University)

Agrarian Studies Graduate Affiliate Fellow

Christian Espinosa Schatz is a Ph.D. candidate in the combined program in Anthropology and

Environmental Studies at Yale. His research engages with the fields of environmental anthropology, human geography, agroecology, ethnobotany, and science and technology studies to understand how climatic change intersects with the local environmental relations of marginalized peoples. His dissertation, based on intensive ethnographic research with a Mam Mayan community in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, examines how U.S.-bound migration is transforming Mayan land-use practices and how, in turn, Mayans make sense of climate through their changing agricultural landscape. Before coming to Yale, Christian received an M.Phil. in Human Geography from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard University, where he was a first-generation college student.

Mariana Diaz Chalela (History, Yale University)

Agrarian Studies Graduate Affiliate Fellow

Mariana Díaz Chalela is a Ph.D candidate in Latin American history at Yale University. Her research interests include the history of international development, state formation, agrarian reform, and the role of law in shaping historical change. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Borrowing Out of Poverty: Credit and State Formation in the Making of Rural Colombia (1929-1980)” examines the history of agricultural credit policies in Latin America and their connection to state formation and land politics. Before coming to Yale, Mariana earned her law degree and an M.A. in History at Universidad de los Andes and worked as a lawyer in Colombia. Her research at Yale has been generously funded by the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Tinker Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. She was the Agrarian Studies Program Coordinator for the past academic year.

Graduate Coordinator

Shalini Iyengar (Anthropology, Yale University)

Agrarian Studies Graduate Student Coordinator

Shalini Iyengar is a lawyer and doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Her research is situated at the intersection of law and place-making, critical ocean studies, and environmental justice in the Indian littoral region. Shalini’s historically informed ethnographic doctoral project investigates the process by which rights claims, multi-scalar discursive flows, and efforts for more-than-human flourishing makes and unmakes the Indian coastal zone. Shalini is the Agrarian Studies Program Coordinator for the 2024-2025 academic year, please direct inquiries about the Program in Agrarian Studies to her at agrarian.studies@yale.edu.