Anglo-American Fellowship Recipients

R. Kirk Underhill Graduate Fellowships in Anglo-American Studies

The Anglo-American Studies Program supports the R. Kirk Underhill Graduate Fellowship for Berkeley graduate students whose research focuses on Anglo-American affairs, including but not limited to issues involving international relations, politics, history, law, economics, art, language, literature, and culture. Priority is given to students whose work is centrally concerned with US-UK relations, the Commonwealth of Nations and British colonial history. Students from a broad range of disciplines are urged to apply.

Recipients

2024

Tak-Huen Chau (Political Science)
"Who Belongs To The Nation? How Immigration and Diversity Shape National Identity in the UK and the US"

"Who is ‘truly’ British or American? What are the necessary traits required for someone to be considered a member of the nation? Why would some believe speaking English is sufficient to be a ‘true’ British person, while others believe British ancestry is essential? This project causally tests how increasing minority presence shapes how natives think who gets to be a ‘true’ member of the nation.

This project is the second chapter in my dissertation. In my first chapter, I build a formal model to understand key trade-offs between receiving surpluses in interacting with others, and molding oneself and others’ behavior. Drawing upon Shayo (2009): identities are a bundle of traits, individuals expressing a dissimilar identity from their endowed traits suffer from a cost, and individuals prefer others in the group having (some) similar traits. The key innovations are: the cost of acquiring said traits varies by trait and by individual, there is a trade-off between incorporating more minorities in said group and lowering the threshold of incorporation, and group size matters in such trade-offs. Two key hypotheses emerge from the model. First, an increase in the minority group size creates more ‘inclusive’ national identities. This is not because dominant group members somehow become more generous, but that they cannot ‘extract’ higher effort from minorities. Second, conditional on similar local views on national identity, minorities where their group size is smaller will exert more effort into acquiring traits considered essential to the national identity."

Matthew Kovac (History)

"One Struggle: A Global History of the Irish Republican Movement, 1956-1994"

"My dissertation project, One Struggle: A Global History of the Irish Republican Movement, 1956-1994, seeks to explain how the “Troubles” in the North of Ireland, so often depicted as a localized ethno-religious conflict, became a global flashpoint in the struggle for decolonization. By following the activities of Irish solidarity committees across Europe, Australasia, and the Americas, I trace how Irish republicans
imagined themselves, and were imagined in turn, as partners in a truly worldwide struggle for national liberation and social revolution – an alliance which sought to challenge the conventional boundaries between First World and Third World, Global North and Global South. In so doing, I will show how
radical hubs like Paris, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam served as important conduits to the better-known “Meccas of Revolution” in Algiers, Cairo, and Beirut, facilitating the flow of ideas, people, and matériel between European solidarity networks and Third World revolutionary movements. These networks, I argue, helped position the Irish republican struggle squarely within the Third World project, forging alliances with the African National Congress (ANC) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and paving the way for what I term the “global Irish republican moment” of the 1980-1981 hunger strikes."

Alex Yong Kang Chow (Geography)
"Decolonial Moments of British Hong Kong from the 1960s to 1990s"

My research seeks to comprehensively understand Hong Kong's unique decolonial journey and its broader implications for studying decolonization processes worldwide.

In the 1980s, Hong Kong's shift from British colonial rule to integration with the People's Republic of China (PRC) stirred anxiety, diverging significantly from the sovereignty pursuits of other former British colonies. Many Hongkongers, primarily refugees from mainland China since 1949 and their descendants, saw the sovereignty transfer not as liberation but a potential slide into recolonization and loss of economic freedoms. Four decades later, the implementation of the "One Country, Two Systems" policy, which allowed the PRC state and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to maintain distinct political, economic, and legal systems, led a new generation in Hong Kong to perceive Chinese rule as a form of neo-colonization. Despite the official end of British colonial rule in 1997, the "One Country, Two Systems" framework has introduced complexities and contradictions. While it has granted Hong Kong a degree of autonomy and distinctiveness from mainland China, allowing the preservation of its economic, legal, and political systems, it has also sparked concerns among many Hongkongers about diminishing freedoms and identity due to the growing influence of the Chinese government and its policies. At the core of Hong Kong’s decolonial journey lies a paradox, revealing a contradictory moment that defies three fundamental dichotomies underlying the conventional decolonial theories: (1) Firstly, European colonialism versus anti-colonial nationalism oversimplifies Hong Kong's colonial and post-colonial ideological conflicts; (2) Secondly, contrasting exploitative capitalism with equalitarian socialism fails to capture the nuances of Hong Kong's economic structure vis-à-vis China, the United Kingdom, and the United States; (3) Thirdly, the distinction between advanced capitalist economies and developing socialist or capitalist economies does not neatly fit Hong Kong's changing liminal position."

Past Recipients

2020

Makoto Fukumoto (Political Science)

My dissertation studies how economic geography, place-based policies, and workers’ geographical movements impact geographically-based polities such as those of the United States and the United Kingdom. In both countries, I found that geographically mobile voters are often moderate and have a high level of social engagement but far less likely to participate in political activities, suggesting the link between the geographical “stickiness” and amplified political polarization. Moreover, I found in the UK that banning fracking sites or closing down coal- powered plants did not aggravate or ameliorate the local attitude vis-à-vis the environmentalism and regulations in the affected areas. This confirms the “stickiness” of political attitude but also casts doubt on the potential backlash that many policymakers are fearing. In another paper, I found that pork-barrel spending in the area can lower the support for the federal government who paid the bill, as opposed to the local representative who got the funding. While I used British data, these findings have resonance with the “love my congressperson but hate the congress” attitude observed in the US and how net-beneficiary states of federal spending such as Alaska are often hostile to the federal governments. Fundamentally, the tenet of my dissertation is that geography-based policy may strengthen those who do not want to change their location or those who do not want their location to change. The opinion of those people tends to be sticky as well, even if the local situations change or the governments try to compensate for the disturbance. This “stickiness bias” could pose a significant challenge in the fast-changing society today. While I relied heavily on the findings from the UK, I believe this research can speak to US politics as well.

2019

Sarah Stoller (History)

Sarah Stoller is a PhD student in History. Her dissertation is entitled Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain. Since the 1970s, it has become commonplace to suggest that families across the developed West have lived through a revolution on a scale unprecedented since industrialization. The rapid rise in maternal employment and the emerging middleclass norm of the dual-income household coincided with declarations of a new era of the ‘working parent.’ This project charts the politics that shaped the invention of the working parent as it arose out of a new institutional culture of work. It takes as its starting points the shifting political-economic terrain of the 1970s and feminist campaigns for childcare, flexible work, and a more equitable division of affective labor. It tells the story of efforts to embed new forms of support for workers with caring responsibilities in institutions across the charitable, public, and private sectors, and explores the advent of the ‘family friendly’ workplace. It also highlights the ways in which individuals sought to make sense of their day-to-day lives as ‘working parents,’ and to reckon with the associated imperative of ‘work-life balance.’ In the process, the project engages the classed and racialized notion of a new working parent and touches on the experiences of single parents, childcare workers, and men and women of a variety of backgrounds. It argues that working parenthood has consolidated the gains of second wave feminism at the same time as it has masked the realities of ongoing social inequality in the distribution of caring work, and facilitated an intensification of contemporary work culture.

2017

Allison Neal (English)

Allison Neal’s research focuses on Anglo-American speech-based poetry composed between 1900 and 1975 alongside various methods of controlling and disseminating the “American voice” in the lead up to and height of the American era. By examining how various British and American cultural and governmental institutions sought to consolidate and spread a representative English-speaking voice both domestically and abroad, this project suggests a new approach to the story of twentieth-century English language poetry.

2016

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Political Science)

My dissertation examines the ideological and theoretical frameworks with which the scientist, lawyer, politician, and literary author Francis Bacon contested Spanish imperial claims and asserted British claims to Atlantic empire, while advocating “just” conquest, colonies, and overseas plantations. In the writings of Bacon and his contemporaries the arguments over just war and the religious and prudential justifications of empire were at the core of the early modern articulation of the relation between the Britain and the American colonies as well as the relation between Britain and the uncolonized Americas. 2015 Sam Wetherell (History) The working title of my dissertation is ‘Freedom Planned: Neoliberalism and the Late Twentieth Century British City.’ My project will chart the end of Britain’s social democratic welfare state in the late 1970s and Britain’s transition to a more globalized, flexible and service orientated economy through Britain’s changing built environment. I am interested particularly in how the changing fabric of British cities reflected, normalized and helped generate new understandings of economic and social life. By taking the built environment as an object of historical study I want to establish a new vantage point from which to view the history of late twentieth century political and economic change, one that avoids giving causal autonomy to either high politics or structural economic change. My research revolves around four key case studies: the emergence and proliferation of the ‘enterprise zone’ and other similar utopian deregulatory planning strategies, the planning of ‘National Garden Festivals’, a highly visible government sponsored strategy for reclaiming former industrial land, the growth of private enclosed shopping environments (and the privatization of state built shopping precincts) and the privatization of Britain’s public housing stock following new criminological ideas about the relationship between space and crime. Finally I want to investigate the new social and political formations that emerged in British cities to contest these processes. Was it the case that these urban changes produced their own brand of discontents?

2014

Tehila Sasson (History)

Tehila Sasson’s dissertation examines the emergence of humanitarian ethics for famine relief in Anglo-American history from 1880 to 1985. She argues that while this ethics was a product of global technologies for famine relief, these technologies were rooted in colonial knowledge.

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