Fall 2014 Rockefeller Senior Honors Thesis Grant Recipient Rianna Starheim

The Rockefeller Center is proud to announce the Fall 2014 recipients of the Senior Honors Thesis Grants. This series highlights each recipient of a Rockefeller Senior Honors Thesis Grant for Fall 2014.

The Rockefeller Senior Honors Thesis Grants program provides grants of up to $1,000 for undergraduate students writing a senior honors thesis in the social sciences. For more information on deadlines and how to apply, see our website here.

Rianna Starheim

Rianna Pauline Starheim is a Middle Eastern Studies major from rural upstate New York. Her research explores the response to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in emergency and conflict settings, focusing on SGBV interventions in the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan. Starheim has worked most recently against SGBV as the assistant to director of country at Hagar, in Kabul, Afghanistan. In this role, she created the first-ever human trafficking training for Afghan border police, was heavily involved in the creation of a UNHCR-supported working group on the psychosocial response to SGBV in Afghanistan, and worked directly with SGBV survivors in Kabul-area shelters to document their stories. Starheim first came into contact with human trafficking while studying Arabic in Morocco and has also worked as a fellow for Polaris Project, an organization that works against human trafficking. Starheim has lived and traveled across the globe, including Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Taiwan, Brazil, Europe, and Morocco. Her advisor is Lisa Baldez.