Preston Stewart

Preston Stewart recently served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Viet Nam from 2022 to 2024. As a TEFL Volunteer, Preston was assigned to live in a community outside central Hanoi, learning about the public education system in Viet Nam while working alongside local counterparts to adapt the English language curriculum into lessons promoting communicative language learning. Preston took on a leadership role within his cohort, building relations with local authorities and coordinating with Peace Corps staff on national-level negotiations to promote Volunteer wellbeing and community integration.

Prior to serving in the Peace Corps, Preston graduated from Harvard College in 2022 with a B.A. in Government cum laude and a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy. His senior thesis focused on Cambodia's foreign relations, namely those with China, the US, and Viet Nam, in the years following the Khmer Rouge genocide. The thesis sought to understand Cambodia's anti-US push and parallel authoritarian backsliding in the late 2010s through an analysis of historical sources and interviews for current perspectives. While an undergraduate, Preston was also involved in numerous volunteer organizations serving low-income communities and promoting civics.

At Georgetown, Preston will fashion his previous experience with and studies of regions recovering from conflict into takeaways that can inform future development in conflict-affected areas. In particular, Preston is interested in studying revenue generation for funding humanitarian and development initiatives, the effects of national identity-building on development cooperation, and localized approaches to humanitarian response.

Summer internship

This past summer, I interned in Hanoi, Vietnam with Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, a leading grassroots anti-trafficking organization in Southeast Asia. I supported the Monitoring, Evaluations, Research, and Learning team of Blue Dragon's Anti-Trafficking Department through research. I contributed substantively to three reports: 1) a political economy analysis of the anti-human trafficking sector in Vietnam and relevant context; 2) background research into the social, political, and economic context of the Ca Mau region in southern Vietnam in preparation for new Blue Dragon programming in the area; and 3) an analysis of trafficking victims report data collected by Blue Dragon, spanning about 20 years, that isolated the effects of different forms of trafficking onto the length of time which survivors of trafficking were forced to spend away from home. Contributions to the analyses included literature review and quantitative analysis, including use of regression analysis and Propensity Score Matching methods on Stata.