Six international scholars selected as Princeton’s 2026-27 Fung Global Fellows

Six exceptional scholars from around the world were awarded the 2026-27 Fung Global Fellowship. 

Those selected for the 2026-27 academic year are: 

• Sana Aziz, assistant professor, Aligarh Muslim University
• Sofia Gavrilova, researcher, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, in Leipzig, Germany
• María Patricia Ordóñez, professor, Universidad San Francisco de Quito
• P.C. Saidalavi, assistant professor, Shiv Nadar University in Greater Noida, India
• Sanaz Sohrabi, assistant professor, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada 
• Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, research associate, Freie Universität Berlin

The new cohort will focus on “The Politics of the Archive,” exploring the international inheritance of libraries, museums, and archives across the globe, thinking about how collections have been created and how they are maintained, justified, or redacted in light of current politics. 

The Fung Global Fellows Program is funded by a portion of a $10 million gift from Princeton 1970 alumnus William Fung of Hong Kong, designed to substantially increase the University’s engagement with scholars around the world and inspire ideas that transcend borders. The program is administered by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).

Michael Laffan, the Paula Chow Professor of International and Regional Studies and director of the program remarked that: “We are very excited to welcome this third and last cohort pondering the ongoing impact of colonialism in shaping our world. Each of the fellows chosen bring important insights into that process, and from vantage points that are seldom considered together. My hope is that such juxtapositions and the public lectures we will offer in both semesters will enrich their respective research and campus life in general as they further engage with the many wonderful colleagues we have here.”

More about the fellows: 

Sana Aziz earned her doctorate in History from the University of Delhi and specializes in medieval and early modern Indian history. Her research interests include the intellectual and epistemic traditions of northern India during the medieval and early modern periods, as well as the pedagogy and writings of Islamic ulema in the eighteenth century. As a Fung Fellow, Aziz will work on “Archiving the ‘Colonized’: Muslim Documentary Traditions and the Colonial Politics of Preservation in South Asia,” which situates South Asian archival experiences within broader frameworks of colonialism, restoration and the migration of custodians of memory. 

Sofia Gavrilova’s research lies at the intersection of political and human geography, memory studies and the history of knowledge, with a regional focus on the former Soviet space. She examines how spatial imaginaries, migration and infrastructures of knowledge production shape political identities and postimperial relations. At Princeton, Gavrilova will work on “The Politics of Left-Behind Knowledge,” which examines the afterlives of Soviet geographical knowledge preserved in libraries and archives across the former Soviet republics. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. 

María Patricia Ordóñez is an Ecuadorian archaeologist and anthropologist. Her work focuses on heritage politics, global landscapes of collecting and collaborative research with Amazonian Shuar and Kichwa communities, particularly around repatriation and knowledge transfer. During her fellowship year, Ordóñez will focus on mestizo identity as a collected and narrated history across Ecuador and Colombia. Her research engages questions of collecting, heritage and the ways histories and identities are constructed through objects, collections and their interpretation.

P.C. Saidalavi is an anthropologist with research interests in hierarchy, labor and religion in South Asia. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Australian National University and is the author of “Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy: Caste, Labor and Islam in India.” As a Fung Fellow, Saidalavi will work on his second book project, which explores the Arabimalayalam literary tradition in Kerala, India. His research brings a literary and anthropological perspective to questions of how knowledge, memory and intellectual traditions are produced, preserved and transmitted.

Sanaz Sohrabi works with essay film and installation as means of research to explore the relationship between the political economy of photography, archival technologies, and the visual history of resource extraction and postcolonial sovereignty in Iran and broader West Asia. Her current project is conceived as a trilogy of archive-based essay films, consisting of One Image, Two Acts (2020), Scenes of Extraction (2023) and An Incomplete Calendar (2026).  As a Fung Global Fellow, Sohrabi will work on her second feature film and on transforming her film trilogy into an artist book manuscript on archival film practices. Her work will bring artistic and visual approaches to the cohort’s broader consideration of archives, archival technologies and the politics of historical representation.

Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ Vũ is a cultural historian of state socialism whose work examines the global cultures of socialism linking Poland and North Vietnam as well as their role in the making of socialist postcolonialism. As a Fung Fellow, she will examine dispersed and seemingly ephemeral diasporic archives of Vietnamese communities in Poland, from the state-socialist period through post-1989 transformation. Often devalued or overlooked, these visual traces of Vietnamese presence document the everyday lifeworlds of migrants shaped by both precarity and resilience. She received her Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence