Meet Mary Shiraef, 2021 APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grantee

The American Political Science Association is pleased to announce the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG) Awardees for 2021. The APSA DDRIG program provides support to enhance and improve the conduct of doctoral dissertation research in political science. Awards support basic research which is theoretically derived and empirically oriented.

Mary Shiraef, University of Notre Dame

Mary A. Shiraef is a Ph.D. Candidate in political science at the University of Notre Dame. Her work examines identity transmission outcomes of border policies, with a focus on collective memory, migration, and sites of memorialization during and after periods of authoritarian rule. With an MLitt degree in International Relations theory from the University of St Andrews and an M.A. degree from the University of Notre Dame specializing in comparative politics, her PhD dissertation draws from historical and contemporary data to address the questions: how are minority identities transmitted under authoritarian institutions and under which conditions are they linked to political beliefs and behaviors? Her population of interest is those born in Albania 1913 to now. Her research connects with post-Soviet literature on identity and to broader migration and authoritarianism literatures. Her work is also supported by a Boren Fellowship.

She is also a recent contributor to #openscience efforts, having led a team which hand-coded an original dataset of border policies introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project covers 200+ countries and associated island territories and was published in the open access journal Scientific Data under the Nature Portfolio.