Jillian Jaeger, FLAS Awardee named Inaugural Newman Award Winner

As the inaugural Newman Fellow, Jaeger will delve into patterns of voting in US mayoral races to determine which factors attract voters to minority and immigrant candidates. Her interest in the subject grew out of her studies of partisanship, political behavior, and incorporation of minorities and immigrants in the United States and Western Europe.

“I did my master’s in international relations at BU, where I was a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellow at the African Studies Center,” she says. (The FLAS Fellowship is a grant program sponsored by the US Department of Education.) “While studying North Africa, I became really interested in Moroccans and Algerians living in Western Europe. Belgium, for example, was one of the locations where I looked at the process of political incorporation. Based on what I learned in that case, I wanted to know more about immigrants living in the US. I felt like I should become a little more familiar with what was going on in my own backyard.”