Student

Claire Wrigley

Claire Wrigley is a PhD candidate in modern European history, specializing in Britain and its empire. Her dissertation, Family, Nation, Empire: An Imperial History of Public Housing in Britain, 1890-2017, argues that the law of public (council) housing was a domestic expression of the politics of empire and decolonization as it was designed to produce stable, productive working-class families who took a particular form, that of the white, heterosexual nuclear family. Drawn from research at over fifteen local and national archives around the UK, her work has been supported by...

Douglas Sangster

Douglas Sangster is a Ph.D. Candidate at U.C. Berkeley School of Law. He studies the history of health care, disability activism, and law in the United States during the twentieth century. He received funding from the Gottenberg Scholarship Fund (twice) and the Selznick Scholarship Fund while in law school. Douglas has worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission as an Honors Intern and he has volunteered as a student co-director of the Workers Rights' Disability Law Clinic. He earned a law degree from U.C. Berkeley School of Law, a master's degree...

Jiahui Duan

JSD Candidate
JSD

Jiahui Duan is a JSD candidate in the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a Lloyd M. Robbins Fellow. Her current research studies workplace sexual harassment issues in China, aiming to understand the development of workplace sexual harassment issues in Chinese society and explore a potential anti-sexual harassment route in the emerging economy and political context such as China’s. Her research is built on substantial fieldwork where she conducts in-depth interviews with individual employees who have been harassed and investigates how they...

Xavier Durham

PhD Candidate
Sociology
Xavier Durham (he/him) is a rising fourth year graduate student in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. His project "Discourse and Private Policing on University Campuses" contends with the rise of private policing in the United States, an employment sector that has sharply outpaced public police and poses new questions for the future of social control, political economy, contemporary governance, and even the future of policing itself. Outside of academia, he enjoys musical theatre, banana bread, and making the occasional viral tweet.

Eduardo Bautista Duran

Eduardo Bautista Duran is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law. Originally from Michoacán, Mexico, Eduardo was raised in East San Jose, California. His work focuses on the development of police forces in early statehood California, particularly in Gold Rush-era San Francisco. This genealogicalapproach is designed to capture the rise of policing and other criminal justice institutions as California entered statehood and as San Francisco underwent an explosive transition from a bayside settlement to an international...

Emily Martin

2025-2026 BELS Fellow

Emily Martin is a PhD candidate in the University of California, Berkeley’s History department. She is currently working on a dissertation studying the relationship between diet and racial susceptibility to disease in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. Her dissertation broadly outlines how medical and legal public health frameworks make use of radicalized cultural practices like diet to rationalize and exercise control over marginalized communities. Prior to starting her doctoral work, she received her Bachelor’s in History and...

Emily Reich

2025-2026 BELS Fellow

Emily Reich (she/her) is a third-year doctoral student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster in UC Berkeley's School of Education. Her current research agenda investigates the expansion of Israeli curriculum into East Jerusalem. More broadly, she is interested in using qualitative methodologies to capture how education policies unfold in practice. Her additional research projects include studying California schools' utilization of COVID-19 relief funding and examining community mobilization around the implementation of CA's ethnic studies curriculum...

Alinaya Fabros

Alinaya Fabros is a PhD candidate in Sociology studying labor globalization, political economy, and transnational social reproduction. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics and MA in Sociology from the University of the Philippines and UC Berkeley. Her dissertation is a comparative study of two longtime migrant labor regimes that developed in neighboring Philippine villages following the 1974 New Labor Code, the law often cited for producing the most globalized labor force on the planet and generating the emigration governance model currently replicated in developing countries...

Jessie Harney

PhD Candidate
Goldman School of Public Policy

Jessie Harney is a PhD student and Graduate Student Researcher at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Her research interests are in criminal justice system reform with a specific focus on mental health and improving outcomes for those whose lives are impacted by the carceral system. She holds degrees in Psychology (BS) from Truman State University, Biostatistics (MS) from Washington University in St. Louis, and Public Policy (MPP) from the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy.

Christian Hosam

PhD Candidate
Political Science

Christian Hosam is an incoming fourth year doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at Berkeley. Broadly, his interests are in race and politics, with particular interests in Black politics, coalition and conflict between communities of color, public health, and the politics of representation. His dissertation project, Corrupting the Conscience: The Congressional Black Caucus and Constraints of Black Politics, looks at why, even in spite of increasing influence and seniority, the Congressional Black Caucus does not account for corresponding gains for Black...