Mary A. Shiraef is a Ph.D. Candidate in political science. She specializes in comparative authoritarianism, national identity politics, and post-communism. Her work examines identity transmission, with a focus on collective memory, immigration, borders, and sites of memorialization during and after periods of communist, authoritarian rule. Her PhD dissertation to address two lines of research: (1) how are minority identities transformed under authoritarian institutions and (2) under which conditions are they linked to lasting political beliefs and behaviors? Shiraef's Fulbright-Hays award addresses the second question, involving two months of data collection in southern Albania and four months in northern Greece, primarily at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki. The data she will collect is from civil registries and cemeteries.