The Graduate Center, CUNY, Announces the Recipients of the 2026 Eric Wolf Dissertation Research Grants

The Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Eric Wolf Dissertation Research Grants. This year, the program will provide support to seventeen doctoral candidates representing all four subfields of the discipline.

These awards, totaling more than $170,000, are made possible through the generous contributions of alumni and friends of the program. Their support has been particularly vital given the recent shifts in the federal funding landscape that have reduced or eliminated many traditional pathways for dissertation research support in anthropology:

• Ariel Barrera (Biological Anthropology): Mandibular Tooth Root Morphology in Extant Hominids and Fossil Hominins
• Bailey Colohan (Biological Anthropology): Interpreting Mechanical Loading and Locomotion Patterns from Fibular Midshaft Microstructure
• Tricia Basdeo Deonarine (Archaeology): The People of the Kharga Oasis: Skeletal Analysis of a Legacy Collection
• Calvin Edward (Cultural Anthropology): The Political Lives of Wolves: Contesting Land and Livestock in Rural Oregon
• Sarah Elaebrak (Archaeology): Peripheral Agency Under Empire: Meat Consumption and Provisioning in Roman Egypt
• Louis Gorgone (Biological Anthropology): Socioendocrinology of Female Forest-Living Olive Baboons
• Madison Grant (Biological Anthropology): Evolutionary Insights from Socioecology and Skeletal Dynamics in a Population of Rhesus Macaques
• Salman Hayat (Cultural Anthropology): Labors of Depletion: The Sugar Belt in Pakistan
• Alexandra Idso (Biological Anthropology): From Heel to Toe: Exploring Hominin Bipedalism through Biomechanical Modeling
• Elbunit Kqiku (Cultural Anthropology): What Lies Below: Sensing Risk and the Remaking of Borders in Kosova’s Minefields
• Maya Latif (Cultural Anthropology): Carceral Continuums: Transgenerational ‘Foreignness’ and the Politics of Penality in Germany
• Maleha Mahmud (Biological Anthropology): Behavior, Physiological Stress, and Parasitism in an Endangered Folivorous Primate in Bangladesh
• Adam Mikhail (Cultural Anthropology): Bordering the Sea: Mobility, Labor, and the Making of Sovereignty in the Strait of Gibraltar
• Leah Mollin-Kling (Archaeology): Practical Interventions and Feasible Solutions: Using Anthropological Methods to Transform Archaeological Practice
• Rocio Rayo (Cultural Anthropology): Sacred Choreographies: Maternal Memory and the Dance of Resistance
• Nikhil Sood (Linguistic Anthropology): Regimes of Self-Transformation: Coaching, Cognitivism, and Capitalist Personhood in Silicon Valley
• Moa Zacharia (Cultural Anthropology): Farms or Forests? Settler Peasants and the Turn to Eco-development in Kerala, India