Rachel Odell and Meicen Sun awarded Smith Richardson Fellowships

MIT Political Science

Rachel Odell and Meicen Sun

PhD Candidates Rachel Esplin Odell and Meicen Sun

Images: Daniel DeKadt

Rachel Odell and Meicen Sun have each been awarded a Smith Richardson Foundation World Politics and Statecraft Fellowship. Awards are granted to support Ph.D. dissertation research on American foreign policy, international relations, international security, strategic studies, area studies, and diplomatic and military history.

The purpose of the fellowship program is to strengthen the U.S. community of young scholars and researchers conducting policy analysis in these fields by supporting the research and writing of policy-relevant dissertations through funding of field work, archival research, and language training, with preference to those projects that could direclty inform U.S. policy debates and thinking.

Rachel’s Odell's dissertation, titled “From Revisionism to Contestation: Stability and Change in the International Maritime Regime,” studies how countries interpret and apply the international law of the sea in their claims to jurisdiction over the oceans, in an effort to better understand sources of stability and processes of change in international legal regimes. She will be using her fellowship from the Smith-Richardson Foundation to conduct fieldwork for her case studies of Indian and Chinese maritime jurisdictional claims.

Meicen Sun’s dissertation will examine the effect of Internet policy on great power relations through trade and innovation, notably between the U.S. and China. She will be conducting a research field trip to China as part of her Fellowship commitment.

Please join us in congratulating these two on their hard work!