The Andrea Mitchell Center is proud to announce that Yara Damaj (PSCI) and Miranda Sklaroff (PSCI) have been selected as our graduate student fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Yara M. Damaj is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania where she studies the relationship between humor, anxiety, and politics. She holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy and International Affairs from the American University of Beirut (AUB) where she also completed her undergraduate studies in both, Psychology and Politics with a minor in Human Rights and Transitional Justice. Yara has extensive experience working in academic research with a marked interest in theorizing events in the MENA region using critical theory, political economy, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. Her research has won her various grants, fellowships, and awards. More recently, Yara’s dedication to student-facing work has been recognized through the Alvin Z. Rubinstein Award for teaching Excellence by a graduate student in Political Science. In addition to research and teaching, she has also been serving as Resident Advisor at the Penn College Houses since 2020. Her commitment to her role has won her the “Excellence in Team Leadership” and the “Innovation and Creativity” awards.

M. Edith Sklaroff is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation "Anti-Eugenics: Theory and Practice in the Twentieth Century" examines the historical entanglements of anti-eugenics and anticolonialism, welfare rights, reproductive health, and anti-abortion politics to develop a theory of how both eugenics and anti-eugenics function as political epistemologies. Sklaroff's research broadly engages with family abolition, reproductive justice, and the intersection of political theory and public policy. Her other work includes a Gramscian account of "false hegemonies" in reproductive policy debates and a critique of etymology as a methodology in the field of political theory. She has a B.A. from the University of Chicago in Comparative Literature with a minor in Classical Studies. Her research has been supported by the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the recipient of the Alvin Z. Rubinstein Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Teece Award. She was a Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Fellow in the academic year 2023-2024.