The American Ethnological Society is pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 AES Graduate Student Research Grant competition.

The AES small grants competition received many excellent proposals, and the committee was challenged to select 8 grant recipients from a large pool of worthy projects. The $2000 award is to fund dissertation research for first- or second-year PhD students. The committee awarded grants to the following graduate students:

Evan Tims, University of Pennsylvania
“Wetland vitalities: Futures and enclosures in the East Kolkata wetlands”

Gloria D’Alessio, Rutgers University
“Making a living at the border: Moral economy and post-boom precarity in a Darién Indigenous community”

I-Chen Chen, Cornell University
“Formatting life: The labor of recognizability in Sabah, Malaysia’s frontier of Indigeneity and statelessness”

Katelyn Zeser, Duke University
“Dominion technology: American evangelicalism in the age of AI”

Ofir Tenenbaum, Boston University
“Unsettled belonging and the politics of ‘safety’: Leftist Israelis in contemporary Berlin”

Safina Azeem Quereshi, The New School
“Binding matter/s: Chemical and social multiplicity intertwined”

Sooah Kwak, University of Pennsylvania
“Companions in quarantine: Biosecurity and multispecies governance in South Korea”

Suraj Kushwaha, Cornell University
“Maintaining a slippery slope: How landslides, avalanches, and logging reshape value in Himalayan mountains”