ISP Research Fellow Apekshya Prasai Selected as a 2023 HFG Emerging Scholar

Apekshya Prasai, a political science doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was recently named a 2023 Harry Frank Guggenheim (HFG) Foundation Emerging Scholar.   The Emerging Scholars (nine in all) are doctoral candidates who are in the final year of writing dissertations on the nature of and responses to violence around the world.

Prasai’s dissertation, "Gendered Processes of Rebellion: Understanding Strategies for Organizing Violence," examines the gendered ways in which insurgents organize violence and highlights the pivotal role women play in shaping the gender strategies rebels adopt. The dissertation draws on extensive data collected through fieldwork in Nepal and archival research in Netherlands and combines interviews, oral histories, official rebel documents, wartime publications, memoirs, letters etc. from leftist insurgent organizations across South Asia to illuminate the gendered processes that underpin rebellion. 

A 2023–2024 International Security Program (ISP) Research Fellow, Prasai was previously a Gender and Security Predoctoral Fellow with ISP (2022–2023) and received the Jeanne Guillemin Prize in 2021.  MIT’s Jeanne Guillemin Prize was established to support women pursuing doctoral degrees in security studies. She is also the recipient of a 2021–2022 Peace Scholar Fellowship from the U.S. Institute of Peace and a 2021 Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the American Political Science Association.

A native of Nepal, Prasai became an undergraduate at Bowdoin College in 2012.  After writing her Honors Thesis on female suicide bombers, she graduated with a B.A. in Government and Legal Studies in 2016.