Serkan Yolaçan’s research broadly focuses on the interplay of past and present in the lives of individuals, diasporas, and states. In all his projects, Yolaçan combines broad space and deep history empirically, and history and anthropology methodologically, to generate geo-historical frames that speak to questions of human mobility, international order, and social change.

His book project, Time Travelers: Pasts and Possibilities in the Caucasus, weaves the modern experiences of Turkey, Iran, and Russia through the lens of a diasporic people from the region of Azerbaijan. By placing mobile Azeris at the center of three major states, he ties together their near-synchronous transformations from constitutional revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth century to expansionist agendas in the twenty-first. Yolaçan’s second project is a comparative study of millennial and messianic movements. It explores how embodied authority, eschatological beliefs, and textual traditions interact to create invisible forms of sovereignty.

He is also part of a collaborative project that opens a new inquiry in political anthropology by studying two ubiquitous figures of the 21st century: strongman and informal diplomat. By shifting the basis of understanding their partnership from bureaucracies to networks, law to trust, and protocols to rituals, the project renders these opaque figures legible to ethnographic and historical inquiry while offering new methodological approaches to the study of populism, authoritarianism, diplomacy, and internationalism.

Alisha Elizabeth Cherian joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as APARC Predoctoral Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year. She is a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. She received her BA from Vassar College in Anthropology and Drama with a correlate in Asian Studies, and her MA in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.

Her dissertation, entitled "Beyond Integration: Indian Singaporean Public Urban Life", investigates how enforced racial integration shapes racial formations and race relations in Singapore. Her project explores everyday encounters and interactions that are structured, but not overdetermined, by the state's multiracial policies as well as colonial histories and regional legacies of Indian indentured and convict labour. With her research, she seeks to contribute to a more ethnographic understanding of how plural societies are approached both scholarly and practically.

Meredith L. Weiss joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as 2024-2025 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia from September 2024 to April 2025. She is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). In several books—most recently, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020), and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022)—numerous articles, and over a dozen edited or co-edited volumes, she addresses issues of social mobilization, civil society, and collective identity; electoral politics and parties; and governance, regime change, and institutional reform in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. She has conducted years of fieldwork in those two countries, along with shorter periods in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Timor-Leste, and has held visiting fellowships or professorships in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and the US. Weiss is the founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) and co-edits the Cambridge Elements series, Politics & Society in Southeast Asia. As a Lee Kong Chian NUS–Stanford fellow, she worked primarily on a book manuscript on Malaysian sociopolitical development.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Olechowski holds a chair for Austrian and European Legal History at the University of Vienna, where he heads the Legal Sources Research Center. He is a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is chair of its Commission for Austrian Legal History. He is also managing director of the Hans Kelsen Institute, a foundation set up by the Austrian Federal Government. 

Olechowski has authored or co-authored six monographs and well over a hundred academic articles. His most important areas of research are the life and work of the Austro-American legal philosopher Hans Kelsen, the Austrian constitutional history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of constitutional justice and administrative justice, and the Paris Peace Treaties 1919/20. Olechowski has taught regularly in Vienna and Bratislava (Slovakia). He gave lectures in Austria as well as in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay. 

At Stanford, he will teach Fundamentals of European Constitutional History in Winter Quarter 2025.

Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and was previously a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Alex’s work focuses on political parties and group identity in Western Europe, in macro-historical perspective. A core theme of her research is understanding how different patterns of political and social organization combine to shape the ‘arena’ of electoral politics and the opportunity space for new competitors.

In her ongoing book project, Alex studies the different ways in which outsider parties articulate group identities and invoke narratives of social conflict in order to gain a foothold in electoral competition. Empirically, the project employs a mixed-methods approach — including qualitative case studies and quantitative text analysis — to compare processes of party-building and entry across five distinct ‘episodes’ of party formation in Western Europe: early twentieth-century socialists, interwar fascists, green and ethno-regionalist parties in the post-war period, and the contemporary far right.