Maria Teresa Melgar

Teresa Melgar is an international student from the Philippines and a doctoral candidate in Sociology. Prior to her graduate studies at UW-Madison, she worked for over 12 years with a variety of non-government organizations seeking to promote political and economic reforms in the Philippines. Teresa has strong academic and professional interests in comparative studies of democratization and development processes in the Philippines, Latin America and other parts of the global South. She is currently working on her dissertation, a comparative study of efforts by state actors and social movement activists to reconstruct historically clientelist local political institutions and deepen democratic participation in the Philippines and Brazil. Teresa will work with the Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD) in the Philippines to understand further its efforts to build more democratic political institutions and advance citizenship rights at the local and national levels.

Read on about Teresa’s fellowship experience here.