The Institute for Regional and International Studies is pleased to announce the six newest recipients of the IRIS Area and International Studies Awards for Incoming Graduate Students. Each recipient receives $5,000 to support international fieldwork or development of language or cultural competence off the UW-Madison campus. The newest awardees are: Rohini Dasgupta, Izabela de Souza, Louis Fosu-Asare, Shruthi Menon, Stephen Zau Zin Myat, and Sagarika Naik.
Rohini Dasgupta (she/her/hers)
MA, History, Jadavpur University (2024)
BA, History (Hons.), University of Calcutta (2022)
My research focuses on the History of Medicine, particularly women’s reproductive health issues in colonial and post-colonial India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I explore this within a comparative global framework, examining how gender and economic disparities intersect in the convergence of traditional and western medical practices.
Izabela de Souza (she/her/hers)
Izabela de Souza is an Afro-Brazilian NGO entrepreneur, educator, and curriculum developer committed to racially equitable education. She is an incoming Ph.D. student in Curriculum and Instruction at UW-Madison. She holds an MA degree in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, where she co-founded the provost’s award-winning Paulo Freire Initiative at Columbia and received the Provost’s Student Excellence Awards 2021-2022 – the Shirley Chisholm Trailblazer Award. Iza, as she prefers to be called, has a BA in Letters from Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie in São Paulo. In her leisure, she enjoys outdoor adventures with her dog, Odara, and watching Asian dramas.
Louis Fosu-Asare 
My name is Louis Fosu-Asare, originally from Ghana. I am pursuing a PhD in Rehabilitation Counselor Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Spring 2024, I received my Master’s at Idaho State University, specializing in Clinical Rehabilitation Counseling. My academic journey has always been driven by a passion for scholarly pursuits and a desire to effect positive change in the field of rehabilitation counseling through research. I firmly believe UW-Madison will provide an exceptional environment to cultivate my skills and work towards achieving my personal and professional aspirations.
Shruthi Menon (she/her/hers)
Shruthi is a first year PhD student in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies in UW-Madison. With an academic background in International Politics and Journalism, she often finds herself pursuing research interests at the intersections of art and politics. Her previous work, as researcher and curator, with independent arts collectives in Bangalore, India has led her to investigate the complex dynamics of caste and labour in India’s creative economies.
Through her doctoral project, Shruthi is interested in exploring the counter-cultural aesthetics of contemporary Dalit and anti-caste theatre in India. She hopes to track the ideational antecedents of their forms, methods, and idiomatic language in its messy entanglements with ‘classical’ Indian performance traditions and Hindu aesthetic philosophies to its present complications with capital and State.
Stephen Zau Zin Myat (he/him/his)
Stephen Zau Zin Myat is a 1st year graduate student at UW Madison. He is interested in the role of religion in the formation of Kachin identity, ethnonationalism, both in the homeland and diaspora. His current foci include the role of Baptist churches among the Kachin diaspora in southern United States, intergenerational experiences of im/mobility among the Kachin in urban Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the influence of religious organization in the formation of Kachin meta – narratives, armed revolution and inter – ethnic relations in Myanmar (Burma).
Sagarika Naik (she/her/hers)
Sagarika Naik’s research concentrates on the history of religious and ethnic minorities in colonial Myanmar, which examines state policies, colonial citizenships, and evolving legal norms from the 19th century until independence. She is also interested in learning Burma’s democratic authoritarian political historical dynamics, the way the country was separated from India, and how, in and through the process of independence, its different ethnic and religious groups were set against each other. Such a colonial history of minoritization in British Burma would provide the necessary backstory of contemporary conflicts between the Myanmar states and their Rohingya minorities. Before joining Madison, she worked on various social science and humanities projects at Ashoka University,Columbia University, James Madison University, Princeton University, and Salem State University, where multiple perspectives including legal history, social anthropology, economic history, and politics are placed in conversation with each other. Her forthcoming publications, including one chapter in Palgrave Macmillan, one article in the Journal of International Migration
and Integration, and two chapters in books emerging from such publishing houses as Lexington, Sage explicitly address at a macro level Inter-Asian labour mobility beyond critiques of Eurocentrism, senses of belonging, forced displacement and statelessness, survival, and economic migration, and the refugee crises in South and South East Asia.
About the Award:
Grants are offered to prospective graduate students as an inducement to study at Wisconsin. Any UW-Madison program that admits graduate students may nominate 1 prospective student each cycle. The grants are intended to help programs that admit internationally-oriented or area-studies-oriented graduate students recruit their top candidates. Visit the award page on our website or email awards@iris.wisc.edu to learn more!