Francesca Grandi

Francesca Grandi is a is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University. She studies the conditions under which political violence constrains reconciliation, economic recovery, and international peacebuilding in the aftermath of civil wars. Her dissertation, a historically and empirically grounded investigation into the nature and impact of post-war political violence, focuses on former resistance movements and generalizes from post-WWII Italy to contemporary settings, including post-Qadhafi Libya. The Social Science Research Council, the McMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale supported her fieldwork in Washington DC and Italy. The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation is currently supporting her dissertation writing-up. Before Yale, Francesca worked at the United Nations in East Timor, Geneva, and New York on human rights, conflict prevention, and peacebuilding and at the European Commission in Brussels on aid-effectiveness. She collaborated with NGOs in rural Ecuador and Washington DC and researched pro-poor growth and anti-cyclical fiscal policies at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Chile. She conducted her undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Epistemology in Italy and Germany and earned a Masters in International Development from the Johns Hopkins University (SAIS). She volunteered in fundraising campaigns for war victims, with immigrants in Italy, in a refugee camp in Croatia, for a mobile soup kitchen in New York, and in a homeless shelter in New Haven.