PhD Alumni
Dissertation Title and Committee:
“Wedded to Warfare: Forced Marriage in Rebel Groups”
Dyan Mazurana (The Fletcher School), Richard Shultz (The Fletcher School), Dara Kay Cohen (Harvard Kennedy School)
Bio
Phoebe Donnelly is a Research Fellow and the Head of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Program at the International Peace Institute. Phoebe is also a Women and Public Policy Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and a Visiting Fellow at Feinstein International Center.
Dr. Donnelly received her PhD in International Relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her dissertation Wedded to Warfare: Forced Marriage in Rebel Groups won the Peter Ackerman Award for the outstanding doctoral dissertation at The Fletcher School in 2019. Phoebe’s research has been featured in several media outlets including BBC Radio, CNN, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post. Her writing has also been published by Global Society and Small Wars and Insurgencies.
How have you utilized your Gender PhD post-Fletcher?
As the head of a program on Women, Peace and Security at a think tank that engages closely with the United Nations, I have utilized not only the substantive material I learned during my PhD at Fletcher, but also the skills I built at Fletcher in communicating about gender and mainstreaming gender into my course work and teaching assistance work.
Dissertation Title and Committeee:
“We are not good victims”: Hierarchies of suffering and the politics of victimhood in Colombia
Kimberly Theidon (Chair), Alex de Waal, Dyan Mazurana
Bio
Dr. Roxani Krystalli is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of St Andrews. Her research and teaching explore various dimensions of feminist peace and conflict studies, as well as the politics of nature and place. She is particularly interested in questions of narrative and storytelling in international politics. Her writing has appeared in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, the European Journal of International Relations, the Oxford Handbook on Gender and Violence, the Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork, among others, as well as in several media outlets and blogs. Her research on the politics and hierarchies of victimhood in Colombia was awarded Peter Ackerman prize for best PhD dissertation in 2020, and her blog, Stories of Conflict and Love, won the Best Individual Blog award at the International Studies Association in 2019. Roxani has spent a decade working as a practitioner in the humanitarian field, focusing on the intersection of gender, justice, and violence, and she regularly advises international organizations on these issues. Born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, she now lives in Dunblane, Scotland.
How have you utilized your Gender PhD post-Fletcher?
After Fletcher, I joined the faculty of the University of St Andrews. This has been a supportive and engaging site of feminist thinking and pedagogy for me. I have had a lot of freedom to design my own classes, and am particularly excited about my undergraduate modules on Feminist Theories in Global Politics and on the Politics of Nature and Place. The feminist curiosity and creativity students bring to the classroom has been a real source of inspiration and hope for me. I am also excited to have developed one of our core Masters level classes on Critical Approaches to Peacebuilding. The seeds of the feminist, decolonial, and critical theoretical lenses that define my research and teaching were sown at Fletcher, and I am grateful to watch them grow.
Personal Website: http://www.roxanikrystalli.com
Dissertation Title and Committee:
White Reckonings: Transformative justice & anti-racist white activists in the United States
Dyan Mazurana (Chair), M. Brinton Lykes, Bridget Conley, Karla Nicholson, Gary Barker
Bio
I am currently (May 2021) a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the University of Erfurt in Germany, where my research and writing focuses on dominant racial and gender groups, how they (we) perpetuate systemic oppression, and why and how some group members seek to challenge the systems that preserve their dominance. I received my PhD from the Fletcher School in February 2021, where my dissertation on “White Reckonings” accompanied anti-racist white activists and male-identified feminists as they endeavored to contribute to transformative justice possibilities in the United States. My current research looks comparatively and globally at issues of colonial-racial reckoning and repair, with a particular focus on Germany and the United States. Prior to my graduate studies, I also worked in global humanitarian assistance and human rights, having managed humanitarian programs in a number of disaster, conflict and post-crisis environments. Raised in the United States, I currently live in Germany with my German partner and binational daughter.
How have you utilized your Gender PhD post-Fletcher?
I just graduated, but my research, teaching and activist commitments each engage personally and structurally with the constructs of gender and race, with a particular focus on (my) intersectional white masculinities
