2025 Fellows

Loay Alarab
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Political Science

Loay Alarab is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science. His research interests center on political theory, postcolonial politics, and Arab political thought. Specifically, Loay is interested in intellectual accounts of non-normative political theorists in the Middle East, such as activists, grassroots organizers, and political party members. In his work, he tries to articulate accounts of refusal, self-determination, and agency based on written, audiovisual, and cultural materials of these non-normative theorists. 

Project Description: Contemporary grassroots movements in the Arab world, especially in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, are often approached as moments of historical rupture or breaking with the dominant social and political status quo. Popular media can and has often portrayed these contemporary grassroots movements, particularly those against gendered domination and for greater gendered equity in the region, as a distraction from national politics. However, placing these contemporary grassroots movements against gendered domination in conversation with an earlier generation of Arab women involved in various national liberation struggles reveals continuities in tactics, claims, and actions. Such grouping is essential in the face of popular discourses that seek to divorce contemporary struggles in the Arab world from the demands of previous national liberation struggles.

Dien Luong
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Communication and Media Studies

Dien Luong is a PhD student at the University of Michigan, where his research explores how authoritarian regimes co-opt emerging technologies to justify and extend state control. He earned his master’s in journalism from Columbia University as a Fulbright scholar.

Dien’s work probes the intersection of geopolitics and social media, with a focus on online censorship, Big Tech–government relations, and the evolving media landscape in Southeast Asia. His scholarship includes book chapters, monographs, and peer-reviewed work, complemented by a portfolio of OpEds in major outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Nikkei Asia, HuffPost, and South China Morning Post. He has held fellowship positions at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute (Singapore), the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Harvard Kennedy School.

For the Donia Fellowship, Dien is examining the rise of digital surveillance and harassment targeting journalists in Southeast Asia, focusing on the barriers journalists face in adopting digital security measures and how these challenges undermine press freedom and human rights protections across the region.

Project Description: With the support of the Donia Human Rights Fellowship, Dien Luong will advance his project, “Digital Intimidation and Invisible Chains: How Perceived Threats Enable Subtle Media Capture in Southeast Asia.” The study examines how perceived digital threats—surveillance, trolling, legal reprisals, and online harassment—shape journalists’ self-censorship in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, implicating core Article 19 rights to freedom of expression and access to information. Building on Phase 1 work (a mapping of global digital-security resources and a survey establishing baseline threats, impacts, and adoption barriers), the fellowship phase deploys a regionally adapted survey alongside semi-structured interviews, triangulated with documentation from international and local advocacy groups. The project will produce the first empirical measurement of the perception–enforcement gap in these contexts and generate practical guidance for newsrooms, press-freedom organizations, and policymakers. Outputs will include a fellowship paper for internal circulation, dissertation chapters, and advocacy-oriented briefs aimed at strengthening journalist protection and digital security practices across the region.

Brittany McWilliams
Doctoral Candidate
Department of History 

Brittany McWilliams is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History where she focuses on disability history, medical history, Latin American history, and U.S. history. She is also working toward a certificate in science, technology, and society. She is particularly interested in researching the history of chronic illness with a specific focus on diabetes and insulin accessibility. Her work takes a hemispheric approach, looking at how diabetes and insulin have evolved over the past century in both Latin America and North America. She examines how this history has contributed to the current global humanitarian crisis around lack of insulin access and affordability. Brittany holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She continues to work with the organization T1International to fight for insulin as a human right.

Project Description: “‘Insulin may not be supplied at present’: Early Insulin Production and Access in the Western Hemisphere” explores how insulin came to be produced, distributed and regulated after its first commercial availability in 1922. The project takes Argentina as an important case study for understanding how Latin America contributed significant knowledge to the production and use of insulin without receiving the short or long-term benefits. This research shows that Argentina was one of the first countries to produce insulin after it was successfully used on patients in Toronto in 1922, and Argentine scientists published prolifically on insulin and diabetes in the years that followed. While Argentine scientists actively sought ways to make the production of insulin cheaper and more accessible, U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies, with the backing of the University of Toronto, implemented a strict system of patents and trademarks that marked a shift in global patenting processes around medicine. This project goes on to link this first decade with the ongoing insulin access crisis today and considers how activists throughout the hemisphere are currently fighting for greater access to insulin and other medications by pushing for public production – the national production of vital medications. Activists see public production as an opportunity to undermine the hegemony of multinational pharmaceutical companies that continue to perpetuate the lack of access to insulin that has its origins in the choices made in the 1920s.