The Tessler Fellows Fund will support a graduate student at the University of Michigan in Political Science who is being mentored by faculty in the Center for Political Studies, with a preference for those who study comparative politics and need funding for fieldwork and data collection. Multiple types of data collection are eligible, including dissertation-related fieldwork to gather quantitative or qualitative information. This fund provides awards up to $6,000.
Application Process
Information about the competition, award amount, and eligibility, along with links to apply, will be available on this website at the end of the calendar year.
Please email any questions to [email protected].
Award Winners
By Patrick Peralta
Project Description
My project addresses a question of global significance: how do survivors of mass violence cope when institutional remedies fail? This challenge is especially relevant in Southeast Asia, where impunity in the wake of dictatorship and genocide has not been the exception, but the rule. Indeed, key transitional justice mechanisms, such as tribunals and truth commissions, have been piecemeal or absent for decades. Focusing on Cambodia and the Philippines, this project suggests that one particular process, forgiveness, enables and even empowers victim communities to survive cultures of impunity. It uses archival research and semi-structured interviews to explain the fraught condition of coexisting with perpetrators, some of whom, with widespread support, retain political power.
I am ever inspired by my research subjects, who share with me their experiences and views as victims of state violence. Through my fieldwork, I get to witness their strength, resilience, courage, and tenacity in the face of extreme odds. Such communities reveal the best of humanity, and their stories must continue to shape the public sphere.
By Hanna Lee
Project Description
Thinking that authoritarian legacy can be one powerful source of many citizens’ support for illiberal elite behavior, my academic pursuit has focused on understanding the influence of authoritarian legacy on the calculus of when and why people abandon democratic values. Specifically, my current research examines, both theoretically and empirically, 1) different channels of authoritarian legacies, and 2) factors explaining heterogeneity in legacy effects.
By: Itsuki Umeyama
Project Description:
My research examines how exposure to racialized and hierarchical violence under conditions of subordination shapes later understandings and uses of authority. I focus on Okinawa during the period of U.S. military administration (1945–1972), when American soldiers operated with broad legal immunity and clear authority over the local population. In particular, I explore whether soldiers who were socialized in environments marked by racial violence, especially those from the U.S. South, where lynching and extrajudicial violence were historically pervasive, were more likely to reproduce similar practices when placed in positions of power.
By: Tyler Rongxuan Chen
Project Description:
My research develops new statistical methods for understanding how different demographic groups vote, even when we can only observe election results at the aggregate level, for instance, knowing the total vote in a county but not how specific racial or educational groups within that county voted. I build a framework that combines survey data with observed election returns to recover these group-level patterns, essentially reconstructing individual-level political behavior from incomplete data. What inspires this work is a conviction I share with Professor Tessler: that understanding what ordinary citizens actually think and do is foundational to the study of democracy. His Arab Barometer surveys gave researchers a way to move beyond elite narratives and measure public opinion directly across the Middle East. My work tackles an analogous problem in American and Asian elections, moving beyond aggregate results to understand the political behavior of specific communities. I hope this methodology will help researchers and policymakers better understand how economic shocks, policy changes, and social transformations affect different groups differently, rather than treating entire regions as monolithic voting blocs.
By: Hood Ahmed
Project Description:
My project develops a novel theory of political supply and demand that explains how non-democratic regimes adapt when their ideological underpinnings become exhausted or when they confront new ideological threats. It combines distinct strands of the literature to offer a framework that unpacks how elites can secure consent and maintain political order amid rapid social and economic change. My project hopes to build on Mark Tessler’s work by advancing a more dynamic understanding of political culture in the Arab world.
I was inspired to work on this because I felt like existing explanations for regime stability in the Gulf have become inadequate. My work questions the assumption that citizens’ loyalty simply stems from the regime’s capacity to distribute resources. Instead, I push beyond the literature’s predominant focus on materialist explanations in accounting for the motivations of ordinary citizens to explain how citizens’ ideational attachments can structure how individuals interpret state action and define political interests.
I hope to turn my project into a book manuscript that can engage with interdisciplinary audiences. More broadly, I hope that my research can enhance our knowledge of the effective interventions that can counter illiberal manipulation tactics and strengthen civic knowledge to support democratic values.
By: Mostafa El Sharkawy
Project Description:
My research examines a central puzzle in the study of authoritarian politics: what is the role of religious leaders in political life? And why do some religious elites, whose positions are often tied to the state, nonetheless act against those regimes during moments of political contention? My dissertation, The Cleric’s Dilemma, argues that clerics are influenced not only by state incentives, but also by social pressures that operate beyond state control—particularly peer networks formed through religious training and pressures from the communities they serve.
To investigate these dynamics, I focus on Kuwait as a critical case and employ a mixed-methods approach that combines fieldwork, interviews, ethnographic observation, and original data collection. I am constructing a comprehensive dataset of clerics, mapping their educational and professional networks, and analyzing their public political speech. This allows me to systematically examine how social ties and local community characteristics shape political behavior among religious elites.
What inspires this research is a broader interest in understanding how authority works outside formal institutions. Religious leaders hold a unique form of legitimacy that is socially produced and cannot be easily controlled by the state. By studying how they respond to political crises, I hope to shed light on when and why elites defect from authoritarian regimes, and how moral authority can influence political outcomes. Ultimately, this project aims to contribute to our understanding of authoritarian resilience, political mobilization, and the role of social networks in shaping political behavior.
By Rebecca Wai
Project Description
I am working with a development program funded by the Danish embassy called, “Northern Uganda Resilience Initiative” to evaluate their farmer group program. Most of their evaluation focuses on agricultural productivity, so my dissertation will add value by helping them understand how farmer groups influence peace and cooperation between refugees and hosts too – which is also a goal of NGOs but is usually targeted with separate programs. I hope that with my work, I will help inform the design of NGO farmer group programs and show that these programs can both increase peace and economic productivity.