Michelle Mayhew
Doctoral student Michelle Mayhew in the History Department received the 2018-19 Baker Peace Dissertation Fellowship.
The award is funded by the John and Elizabeth Baker Peace Endowment, created in the 1980s to fund teaching, scholarship, and conferences at Ohio University that promote the study of conflict and conflict resolution.
Mayhew said she was “excited for the opportunity that the Baker Peace Fellowship offers, in that I will get to be entirely focused upon carrying out research and writing my dissertation. It’s great to be a part of a program which offers so much support in working toward the completion of a dissertation.”
Mayhew’s dissertation is titled “Development through Food: NGOs, the U.S. Government, and the Quest to Create Peace through America’s Food Surplus.” She addresses the intersection between public and private in the carrying out of humanitarian projects such as school feeding programs, projects designed to improve the health and nutrition of expectant mothers and newborn babies, and public works projects.
While substantial research has been conducted on the impacts of the Food for Peace program elsewhere in the world, Latin America has been largely overlooked. Additionally, most research has focused on the actions of governments, meaning that many of the people-to-people programs reaching the most vulnerable populations have been overlooked. Mayhew’s project rectifies this by examining how NGOs worked to implement programs in countries considered to be underdeveloped, while maintaining a relationship with the governments of both the United States and the host country.
As the 2018 academic year comes to an end, Mayhew is planning two research trips before the final push in her dissertation writing: one to the New York and New Jersey area and the other to the Washington D.C.. and Baltimore area. Both trips will focus on collecting documents from the NGOs that worked with the United States and Latin American governments to develop the programs that were a part of Food for Peace.
Mayhew has completed examination fields in U.S. history, Latin American history, and world history. She is writing her dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Chester Pach, Associate Professor of History at Ohio University.
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