The APSA Lee Ann Fujii Diversity Fellowship Program (DFP) travel grant provides support for the professional development of APSA Diversity Fellows and alumni at the APSA Annual Meeting. The grant is named in honor of Dr. Lee Ann Fujii.

Dr. Fujii was a professor at the University of Toronto who researched and published in the area of political violence, ethnicity and race, African politics (especially Rwanda and the Great Lakes), field methods, and research ethics. Support for this grant, which is in its fifth year, has been generously provided by the Fujii family and Dr. Fujii’s friends and colleagues. To learn more about Dr. Fujii, please visit “Remembering Lee Ann Fujii.”

Priority is given to fellows and alumni whose research, teaching, or mentoring focuses in one or more of the areas of political violence, ethnicity and race, African politics, racial violence in the US South, comparative politics, international relations, conflict processes, research ethics, or qualitative and interpretative methods. Learn more about the Lee Ann Fujii Travel Grant at https://apsanet.org/dfp/travelgrant.

LUCIA LOPEZ

Lucia Lopez is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston. Her research centers on the role of policy constraints, such as eligibility criteria and administrative burdens, on public opinion.

JOSÉ O. PÉREZ

José O. Pérez is a PhD candidate in political science at the Ohio State University, majoring in international relations and comparative politics. His research interests include migration and refugee policies, security studies, global health politics, and political violence, with a regional focus on Latin America. Pérez’s dissertation project, “Welcoming Migrants and Refugees: Governance, Labor, and Integration of Venezuelans in Brazil,” examines how Global South states respond to mass migration influxes that occur over short periods of time with innovative policy efforts. Perez’s dissertation fieldwork was funded by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant, and he was previously a 2021 American Political Science Association Diversity Fellow. Pérez holds an MA in international strategic studies from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS, 2019) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He also holds a BA in political science and Latin American studies from the University of Florida (UF, 2014), and was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellow in Brazil (2015, 2016). His research publications include articles in Security Studies, Security Dialogue, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Latin American Perspectives.

MONIQUE NEWTON

Monique Newton (she/her) is a 6th-year PhD candidate in the political science department at Northwestern University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of race and ethnic politics, urban politics, political behavior, political psychology, and political violence. A mixed-method scholar, she employs ethnographic, interview, and experimental methods to examine Black political behavior in cities in the United States. Her dissertation project explores how traumatic events by state agents impact local Black political participation in the United States. In her work, Monique builds upon the Harris (2006) model of the evolution of collective memory and its impact on collective action as it pertains to the contemporary Black Lives Matter social movement. The 2024 Lee Ann Fujii Travel Grant enabled Monique to present her paper, “No Safety: An Exploration of the Meaning of Traumatic Events for Black Americans,” in the Violence, Trauma, and Urban Politics panel at the 2024 APSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

TAYLOR VINCENT

Taylor Vincent is a PhD candidate focusing on international relations and comparative politics at the University of Maryland. She is interested in civil conflict and gender. More specifically, her dissertation examines how political competition between political parties shapes the security of women in post-conflict societies. Previously, she was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Gender and the Security Sector Lab at Cornell University. Prior to her PhD, Taylor received her master’s degree in political science from Duke University in 2019 and her bachelor’s degree from Purdue University in 2015.