HFG Welcomes its 2025 Emerging Scholars September 17, 2025 (NEW YORK) — The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of its 2025 HFG Emerging Scholars. The twelve doctoral candidates—chosen through a rigorous evaluation process—are working to advance knowledge on the nature of and response to violence around the world. The scholars are completing dissertations on a range of important topics, including ideologically motivated violent extremism in digital spaces, organized crime in Colombia’s informal land markets, and racial disparities in fatal police encounters in the United States. FIRST ROW: CHRISTOPHER BAIDOO, JONATHAN BURKE, MATTHEW COETZEE, KEÏSHA CORANTIN, HALEY ALLEN DEMARCO, JIMMY GRAHAM; SECOND ROW: REBEKAH JONES, SAAD LAKHANI, ANNAH MCCURRY, KARMVIR PADDA, JESSIE WALDMAN, DANIEL WAQAR “Relationship aggression, police violence against civilians, political violence from above and below. These are among the problems our new cohort of Emerging Scholars are pursuing on four continents,” said HFG Director of Research Joel Wallman. “Their dissertation projects were chosen for both their intellectual merit and their potential to shed light on a serious problem of violence.” The awards are given to promising researchers in their final year of writing a doctoral dissertation that examines a salient aspect of violence. In selecting the awardees, HFG prioritizes research that addresses urgent, contemporary problems. 2025 Scholars and Research Topics Christopher Baidoo (Boston College) Do Legal Interventions Save Lives? Evaluating Their Impact on Fatal Police Encounters and Racial Disparities Jonathan Burke (New York University) Local Government Expenditures as Structural Determinants of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Firearm Homicides Matthew Coetzee (University of Notre Dame) Rupture and Repair: Community Responses to State Failure and Racial Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa Keïsha Corantin (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) Producing the City Through Violence: The Criminal Regulation of the Informal Land Market in Medellín, Colombia Haley Allen DeMarco (Yale University) Repressing the Resistance: The Police and the Military in Authoritarian Regimes Jimmy Graham (New York University) Collective Violence and Peacebuilding: Evidence from South Sudan on Approaches to Reducing Collective Violence Rebekah Jones (University of California, Berkeley) Autonomous Zones: How Decentralization Undermines Justice in U.S. Local Governments Saad Lakhani (Stanford University) Protectors of the Prophet’s Honor: The Politics of Blasphemy and Respect in Pakistan Annah McCurry (University of St Andrews) Emotion as a Driver of Violent and Aggressive Behaviour Karmvir Padda (University of Waterloo) Navigating the Digital Terrain of Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism: A Comprehensive Analysis of Online Radicalization Jessie Waldman (University of Cape Town) The Cinderella of the South African Courts? Delay, De-Prioritisation and Re-Purposing Process: The Operation of Discretion in Inquests Daniel Waqar (Tufts University) People to the Power: Governing “Violent” Crowds, Section 144, and “Unlawful Assembly” in South Asia, c. 1830s–1970s The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation is a leader in creating and disseminating knowledge on the nature, consequences, and reduction of violence in its many forms, including war, crime, and human aggression. For more information contact: Nyeleti Honwana, Program Officer info@hfg.org | 646.428.0971
