IRiSS Dissertation Fellow receives prestigious Mellon/ACLS fellowship

Dean Chahim, 2019-2020 IRiSS Dissertation Fellow and PhD candidate in anthropology, is one of four Stanford graduate students to receive an Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies fellowship in 2020.  The fellowships support advanced doctoral students in the social sciences and humanities with a year of funding to help them complete their dissertations. Chahim's project, Draining the Infinite Metropolis: Engineering and the Banality of Disaster in Mexico City,focuses on understanding the politics of engineering and the ways that engineering reshapes political and environmental possibilities. For his dissertation, he spent nearly two years in Mexico City conducting ethnographic and archival research on how engineers have attempted to manage flooding amidst unprecedented environmental change, increasingly limited budgets, and the disappearance of long-term planning.

Chahim told the Stanford News Service that it is “an honor to be in the company of fellows around the country pursuing such fascinating projects.” He added that “the fellowship will give me the time and space, as well as a supportive community, to both complete my dissertation research and begin publishing next year.”

To learn about the other Stanford awardees, read the full article.