Samantha Rainford and Braden Cordivari Receive NYU GSAS Dissertation Fellowships

ISAW is proud to congratulate Samantha Rainford and Braden Cordivari, each honored with an NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS) dissertation fellowship for the 2026–2027 academic year.

Samantha Rainford has been awarded the GSAS Lane Cooper Fellowship, which supports dissertation-stage doctoral students in the humanities pursuing teaching careers in history, literature, philosophy or classical and medieval languages. Rainford is completing her dissertation, Women as Primary Heirs at Emar: Intersexuality as a Legal Fiction for a Patrilineal Society, examining the designation of women as primary heirs through their establishment in "male" status in legal texts from Late Bronze Age Syria. Her work explores the intersections of inheritance law, gender, and household religion at Emar as reflected in extant legal documents on family and household succession.

Braden Cordivari has been named a recipient of the GSAS Dean's Dissertation Fellowship, which provides funding to 15 doctoral students in Humanities and Social Science fields during their final year of dissertation work. Cordivari's research focuses on copper alloying practices in first millennium BCE central Anatolia, with broader interests in human-environment interactions around metals and the interconnectivity of the late second and early first millennium BCE world. He also co-coordinates ISAW's Expanding the Ancient World outreach program.