Wendy Leutert, a doctoral candidate in the field of government and international relations, has won a 2015-16 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. A total of 86 fellowships were awarded this year.
The fellowship supports research in modern foreign languages and area studies for periods of six to 12 months. Priority is given to projects that deepen research knowledge on and help the United States develop capability in areas of the world not generally included in U.S. curricula.
Leutert holds a master鈥檚 degree from Tsinghua University, China, where in 2010 she was the first American student to graduate with a master鈥檚 degree in international relations. Her undergraduate degree is in political science and philosophy from Wellesley College.
For her doctoral dissertation, 鈥淪hades of Red: State-Owned Enterprise Reform in China,鈥 Leutert will conduct interviews and perform archival research at Peking University in Beijing and the Chinese University of Hong Kong to inform her analysis of the domestic politics behind China鈥檚 economic reform.
鈥淢y research addresses economic transition in post-communist states, the role of interest groups in non-democracies, and the evolving relationship between the state and market in China,鈥 Leutert said.
She credits her faculty mentor, Peter Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell, and the Department of Government鈥檚 strengths in comparative politics and political economy, for inspiring her to research China with a comparative perspective. 鈥淯ltimately,鈥 she said, 鈥渢his led me to focus my research on the reform of China鈥檚 state-owned companies.鈥
鈥淲endy鈥檚 dissertation is informed by a comparative perspective, while retaining its primary focus on China,鈥 Katzenstein said. 鈥淭he hope is that some of the insights that she will glean from her work will be useful for making us understand the dynamics of state-owned enterprises in other parts of the world.鈥
Leutert explains that she first became interested in Chinese politics during college when she interned at the Hong Kong Legislative Council through a summer program funded by the Luce Foundation. 鈥淏ut further study,鈥 she said, 鈥渨ould have been impossible without Cornell鈥檚 support a decade ago, when I received a fellowship to complete the [Full-Year Asian Language Concentration] in Mandarin Chinese. Language skills provide a foundation for building international experiences.鈥
She continued, 鈥淚nternational study and collaboration make contemporary issues come alive. By working with other experts, you develop a broader and more accurate sense of what is really happening in the world.鈥
Leutert plans to build an academic career based on field-based research and collaboration with scholars in the United States and China.
Her awards include a C.V. Starr Fellowship and a Lee Teng-Hui Fellowship in World Affairs from Cornell鈥檚 East Asia Program, a research travel grant from Cornell鈥檚 Graduate School and a Smith Richardson Fellowship.
The is a prestigious national program awarded by the U.S. Department of Education; at Cornell the awards are administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
This article originally appeared in the .
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