2024-2025 CWAR Graduate Fellows
Cody Billock
Cody J. Billock is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Ohio University, specializing in the history of the Vietnam War and the Cold War. His dissertation employs the city of Huế as a case study to examine the multiplicity and complexities of Vietnamese political life during the thirty years of conflict between 1945 and 1975. His research takes a "Vietnam-centric approach" while situating this local conflict within the context of the broader Global Cold War. Cody's extensive study of the Vietnamese, French, and Chinese languages has facilitated extensive archival work in Vietnam, the United States, and France, with plans to extend this research to the Republic of China.
Hao Chen
Hao Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia. Hao specializes in modern Chinese and Korean history and Cold War international history with a regional focus on East Asia. His research interests include China’s frontiers and borderlands, immigration and transnational history, and North Korea studies. His current project studies the ethnopolitical history of the China-North Korea borderland Yanbian in the 20th century to examine the interaction between China’s ethnic-frontier affairs and its international relations in the Cold War. Hao holds an M.A. (with honors) in international economy and international affairs from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., and a B.A. in history from Peking University in Beijing. He was a visiting fellow at the Kyungnam University Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, Korea, and at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.
Grace Easterly
Grace Easterly is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of
Connecticut focusing on US naval power, maritime
shipping, and the freedom of the seas during the second
half of the twentieth century. Her writing has been
published by Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Asian Interactions and TIME's Made by History series.
She received her BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of
Individualized Study.
Alexey (Alex) Kotelvas
Alexey (Alex) Kotelvas is a second-year Ph.D. student at
the University of Florida. He graduated from Moscow
Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (aka
Shaninka) with the second diploma from the University
of Manchester by joined program. His research focus is
international tourism and cultural diplomacy in Socialist
states. In the project applied for the CWAR program,
Alex is going to explore Soviet international maritime
tourism as a model of internal and transnational
communication. He is interested in how the form of
Soviet cruises contributed to Cold War propaganda, the
perception of the European countries, and travel writing
for Soviet armchair tourists.
Margaret McCool
Margaret McCool is a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana
University, Bloomington and current DAAD Fellow
studying East German global engagement and the
development of an international human rights discourse.
Her dissertation entitled “East Germany’s Human Rights
Campaign: Foreign Policy, Socialist Human Rights, and
Legal Rhetoric in the Global Arena” analyzes how the
East German state utilized human rights as an avenue to
gain a foothold in the global community when many
other economic and diplomatic avenues were closed to
the regime. The project covers multiple, overlapping
historical trajectories during this time period including
decolonization, increasing global engagement by the
GDR, and growing debate and output on human rights
from the UN. Margaret McCool argues that not only did
the SED, East German academics and lawyers, and
government officials develop their own concept and
theory of human rights- socialist human rights- they also
used it as a rhetorical tool to cement their position in the
global community and challenge the West’s moral
authority. The project will specifically focus on the work
of these lawyers in tandem with East German human
rights committees, legal committees, and government
departments.
Mina Rigby-Thompson
Mina Rigby-Thompson is a second-year doctoral student
at the London School of Economics in the Department of
International History. Her dissertation explores American
efforts to navigate between Greece and Turkey during
the 1974 Cyprus crisis and uses this crisis as a lens
through which to better understand the nature of interalliance
conflict. She previously completed both her
Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees at the University of
British Columbia and worked in education prior to
starting at LSE. She is part of 2024-2025 International
Policy and Scholar Consortium Network (IPSCON) Junior
Scholar cohort and she currently works as a Managing
Editor at Cold War History Journal.
Damhee Shin
Damhee Shin is a Ph.D. student in History at The George
Washington University, specializing in 20th-century East
Asian history. Her research primarily focuses on the
history of the Cold War and decolonization, comparative
political-economic history, and US-East Asia relations.
She graduated summa cum laude from Seoul National
University with a B.A. in Economics and a double minor
in Data Science for the Humanities and Philosophy,
Politics, and Economics. Leveraging her interdisciplinary
background and multilingual skills, Damhee looks
forward to pursuing cross-border studies that challenge
physical, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries.
She is committed to contributing to the understanding
and analysis of complex relations and dynamics within
East Asia. (
Luke Thrumble
Luke Thrumble is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of
Nottingham, and his thesis will focus on the global scale
of British foreign policy at the end of the Cold War. His
research broadly relates to international relations
throughout and beyond the Cold War, with a particular
interest in the formative years of the post-Cold War
order in the early 1990s. He serves as the managing
editor of SinoNK.com and has received a BA in History
and an MA in Modern History from the University of
Leeds, where his dissertations examined the British role
in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, respectively.
Lydia Wachs
Lydia Wachs is a Ph.D. candidate at Stockholm
University. Her research focuses on the Soviet
Union’s/Russia’s nuclear nonproliferation policy. Before
beginning her Ph.D. studies, she worked as a research
associate at the German Institute for International and
Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) in
Berlin, where she focused on nuclear issues and Russia’s
security strategy. She has also worked as a research
assistant in the Proliferation and Nuclear Policy
Programme at the Royal United Services Institute in
London. She holds an MA in arms control and
international security from King’s College London and a
BA in international relations from Dresden University in
Germany and Saint Petersburg University in Russia.
Deki Yusuke
Yusuke Deki is a first-year Ph.D. student in International
History at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan. He
received a Master’s degree in International History and a
Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and History
both from Hitotsubashi University. He currently holds
the position of Research Fellow of Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science. His research interests focus on the
cultural dimensions of the end of the Cold War.
Bohan Zhang
Bohan Zhang is a third-year Ph.D. student in the
Department of History at Rice University, Houston,
Texas. His research focuses on the history of America in
the world, with a particular emphasis on Hawaii's role at
the crossroads of the U.S. Empire and East Asia during
the twentieth century. Prior to joining Rice, he earned a
bachelor's degree in history from Tsinghua University in
Beijing and completed two master’s degrees—one in
American history from the University of Oxford and
another in international relations from the University of
Chicago.
Mariah Zhong
Mariah Zhong is a Cambridge Trust scholar and a second-year Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. Her research explores how Japan, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the Republic of China (ROC), or Taiwan, negotiated postimperial boundaries following the dissolution of the Japanese Empire, amid the Cold War. Before transitioning to academia, Mariah worked as a conference interpreter—a career that inspired her to move beyond conveying others’ ideas across languages to developing her own scholarly contributions. Alongside her doctoral research, she serves as a teaching assistant, leading seminars for undergraduate students in both Chinese and Japanese Studies.