Updated May 10, 2012, with profile of Sherella Williams

Last year, Bryn Mawr was among the top producers of Fulbright recipients among all colleges and universities nationally, and it appears that our students are on track for the same sort of success again in 2012.

So far, seven Bryn Mawr students have decided to accept grants from the J. William Fulbright Program for U.S. Students. They are Johanna Best, Chantal Deaton, Anna Melker, Kayla McDaniel, Sara Neidorf, Sherella Williams, and Andrea Tang.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright program was established by Congress in 1946 to “enable the government of the United States to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”

The grants awarded to Bryn Mawr students so far this year are three English Teaching Assistantships and two Study/Research grants. In the weeks ahead we will profile each Fulbright grant recipient and continue to update this article.

Like every recipient of a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship, Chantal Deaton ’12 has plans to pursue research in addition to working as an English tutor in her host country of Germany. But for Deaton, the tutoring work she’ll be engaged with is particularly central to her future goals.

“I consider the Fulbright Teaching Assistantship a key step toward pursuing a career in teaching,” says Deaton, a German and comparative literature double major, who for the last two years has provided writing tutoring to peers who are not native English speakers. She also recently began working with primarily Spanish-speaking students at an elementary school with which the College has a partnership.

“I understand not only the difficulties of language learning, but also how empowering and rewarding it can be. I hope I can motivate students in Germany to take an interest in English beyond learning sentence structure and vocabulary. Learning German has been central to my personal growth since I came to college, and I hope some of the students I meet will experience learning English in the same way,” says Deaton.

Deaton gives much of the credit for her love of language and her interest in helping others master another tongue to her mother, a Swiss citizen who nonetheless knew English better than anyone else in their family, and to her professors at Bryn Mawr.

“My father is an abysmal speller. If there’s a knot that needs untangling, I ask my father, but if there’s a word that needs spelling, I ask my mother,” says Deaton.

While always a good student, Deaton struggled with spelling as a child and doubted her ability to master another language.

“When I first came to Bryn Mawr I did not consider myself a ‘language person,’” says Deaton. “I assumed my spelling struggles precluded me from pursuing foreign language and took German to fulfill a language requirement.

“However, in my first comparative literature class I learned to approach texts with a new set of questions, and caught my first glimpses of German cultural history. Without German literature and the Bryn Mawr Professors who encouraged me (Professors Imke Meyer and Azade Seyhan), I might not have overcome my self-imposed boundaries.”

Her teaching assistantship will be a return trip to Germany for Deaton, who spent her junior year abroad at Humboldt University.

In addition to her duties teaching English, Deaton hopes to research secondary-school student engagement with canonical and non-canonical German texts and films during her assistantship period.  Drawing from her areas of expertise, she will analyze student-writing samples and gauge student interest in these types of texts.

After her Fulbright, Deaton plans to earn her masters or doctorate in German literature or comparative literature but remains unsure as to whether she’ll study in the United States or in Europe.

“As a dual citizen, I plan to live internationally and to benefit communities on both sides of the Atlantic via teaching and/or academic research,” she says.

Click here for profiles of other Bryn Mawr students who received Fulbright grants in 2012.

History of Art Professor Lisa Saltzman has received a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, announced the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation last week.

A total of 181 scholars, artists, and scientists from an application field of almost 3,000 were selected for the prestigious fellowship. Fellowships were given in 54 disciplines. Saltzman was the lone recipient in the “Fine Arts Research” category.

The Guggenheim Fellowship provides funding to allow those selected the time to focus on their research or other creative work.

In addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship, Saltzman was recently named a fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Humanities Center at Williams College, where she will be in residence in 2012-13.  There, she will finish writing a new book that re-imagines the history of photography, with a particular focus on its earliest form, the daguerreotype, as a means of understanding the historical inheritance of the medium and its “afterlife” in contemporary art and culture. The book, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects, is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.

At Bryn Mawr, Saltzman teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern and contemporary art and theory, and from 2003-2009 she served as the director of the Center for Visual Culture. She is the author of Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz and Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art.  She is also the co-editor, with Eric Rosenberg, of Trauma and Visuality in Modernity.

Saltzman received her bachelor’s degree from Princeton in 1988 and her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1994.  In 2002-03, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study.

Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation has granted over $298 million in fellowships to more than 17,300 individuals. Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prize winners are listed among the rolls of the Foundation’s Fellows.

For more information on the Fellows and their projects, visit the Foundation’s website.

For more on Bryn Mawr’s Department of the History of Art, visit the department’s homepage.

At a ceremony on Thursday, April 19, President Jane McAuliffe announced the winners of a host of awards given to Bryn Mawr students. The awards and scholarships cited include honors bestowed by Bryn Mawr as well as those given by outside organizations. The complete list of awards and honorees:

NATIONAL AWARDS

Council on Undergraduate Research Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research
Alexandra Raeber ’13 of Missouri

Fulbright Fellowship
Johanna Best, Ph.D. Candidate in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology
Chantal Deaton  ’12 of Massachusetts
Kayla McDaniel  ’12 of Arizona
Anna Melker  ’12 of New Jersey
Sara Neidorf  ’12 of New Jersey
Andrea Tang ’12 of New Jersey
Sherella Williams ’12 of Pennsylvania

Gates Cambridge Scholarship
Brielle Stark  ’12 of Ohio

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
Leila Zilles  ’12 of New York
Cristina Munoz ’12 of California

Rhodes Scholarship
Nina Cohen  ’12 of Massachusetts

Teaching Assistant Program in France
Rachel Kesselman ’12 of Pennsylvania

UNDERGRADUATE ACADEMIC PRIZES AND AWARDS

Maria Eastman Brook Hall Scholarship
Hao Jiang of Singapore

Charles S. Hinchman Memorial Scholarship
Yue Shao of China
Yuhou Xia of China

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
Genesis Bui of California
Krystal Caban of New York
Madiha Irfan of Pennsylvania
Archana Kaku of Maryland
Karina Siu of Taiwan

Elizabeth S. Shippen Scholarship in Foreign Language
Gillian Diffenderfer of Pennsylvania

Elizabeth S. Shippen Scholarship in Science
Tonima Tasnim Ananna of Bangledesh

UNDERGRADUATE CO-CURRICULAR PRIZES AND AWARDS

McPherson Award for Excellence
Mia Chin of California
Yong Jung Cho of New Jersey
Ariel Kay of Texas

Dr. Hayley S. Thomas Prize in Diversity
Akilah Abdul-Rahman of Pennsylvania
Mia Chin of California
Elena Swartz of Massachusetts

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES AWARDS

Doris Sill Carland Excellence in Teaching Award
Eva Goedhart, Ph.D. Candidate in Mathematics
Johanna Gosse, Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art
Joanna Scott, Ph.D. Candidate in Clinical Developmental Psychology

Anna C. and Oliver C. Colburn Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Johanna Best, Ph.D. Candidate in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

Pierre C. Fraley Scholarship; Alliance Française de Philadelphie
Nicole Mahoney, M.A. Candidate in French

Koc University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) Junior Residential Fellowship
Steve Karacic, Ph.D. Candidate in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

Leventis Foundation Travel Grant; Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm
Stella Diakou, Ph.D. Candidate in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

McPherson Award for Excellence
Diane Amoroso-O’Connor, Ph.D. Candidate in Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies
Christopher Micklewright, Ph.D. Candidate in Mathematics

Homer A. and Dorothy B. Thompson Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Johanna Best, Ph.D. Candidate in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

Mrs. Giles Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities
Stella Diakou,Ph.D. Candidate in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology
Carrie Robbins,Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK AND SOCIAL RESEARCH AWARDS

Shahbanu Goldberg, M.S.S. ’00, Award
Jessica Lee, Ph.D. Candidate

McPherson Award for Excellence
Lia Pongonis, M.S.S. Candidate
Barbara Toews, Ph.D. Candidate

Kevin J. Robinson Award
Layna Glover, M.S.S. Candidate
Marcy Resnick, M.S.S. Candidate

DEPARTMENTAL AWARDS

Berle Memorial Prize in German Literature
Chantal Deaton of Massachusetts

Bolton Senior Award
Elena Swartz of Massachusetts

Mary Louise Cookson Prize in Mathematics
Tina Hu of Taiwan

Frederica de Laguna Award
Jessica Nelson of New York

Elizabeth Duane Gillespie Fund for Scholarships in American History
Mary Margaret Peebles of Georgia

Pauline Jones Prize in French
Grace Barlow of Massaschusetts

Anna Lerah Keys Memorial Prize
Amelia Eichengreen of Connecticut

Sheelah Kilroy Memorial Scholarship in English
Emily Strong of Virginia
Erin Washburn of Maryland

MIT Lincoln Labs Research Award

Computer Science
Cara Takemoto of Delaware
Leila Zilles of New York

Math
Kathryn Link of New York
Tong Wu of China

Physics
Han-Chang Yang of Taiwan

Elinor Nahm in Intermediate Italian
Margaret Price of Pennsylvania
Laura Silla of Colorado
Sofia-Bella Vitale-Gill of Minnesota

Elinor Nahm in Introductory Italian
Vanessa Gonzalez of Brazil
Julia Lester of New Jersey

Elinor Nahm in Italian Language and Literature
Cindy Columbus of Massachusetts
Josephine Nyame of Pennsylvania

Elinor Nahm Prize in Russian Language and Linguistics
Alexandra Kohut of New York

Elinor Nahm Prize in Russian Literature and Culture
Mary Brakenridge of New Hampshire

Elisabeth Packard Fund
Hyoungee Kong of Korea

Charlotte Angas Scott Prize in Mathematics
Kaushiki Dunusinghe of Sri Lanka
Winnie Hien of Massachusetts
Sarah Nelson of New Jersey

Katherine Stains Prize Fund in Classical Literature
Allyson Bunch of New York

Jane Wilkinson Arts Prize
Miranda Liu of Delaware
Aliza Rothstein of Illinoise

Anna Pell Wheeler Prize in Mathematics
Aidan Murphy of Washington
Catherine Owens of California
Jennifer Savage of Florida

LITERARY PRIZES

Academy of American Poets Prize
Mary Alice Freeman of Pennsylvania
Elizabeth Watson of Pennsylvania
Honorable Mention
Jessika Rieck of Texas
Martha Wechslerof Massachusetts

Seymour Adelman Poetry Award
Emily Gaudette of New Mexico
Honorable Mention
Brianna Nelson of Iowa

Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize
Lillie Williams of Tennessee
Honorable Mention
Emily Gaudette of New Mexico
Elizabeth Watson of Pennsylvania

Katherine Fullerton Gerould Memorial Prize
Elizabeth Watson of Pennsylvania
Honorable Mention
Maria Aghazarian of Pennsylvania
Hayley Burke of California
Lauren Smith of Ohio

Richmond Lattimore Prize for Poetic Translation
Gillian Diffenderfer of Pennsylvania
Molly Murry of Oregon

Alexandra Peschka Prize
Hema Surendranathan of Malaysia
Honorable Mention
Hayley Burke of California
Martha Wechsler of Massachusetts

Anne Kirschbaum Winkelman Literary Prize
Hema Surendranathan of Malaysia
Honorable Mention
Emily Gaudette of New Mexico
Rose Heithoff of New Jersey

OTHER BRYN MAWR AWARDS

Seymour Adelman Book Collector’s Award
Stephanie Trott of New Jersey

Hester Ann Corner Prize for Distinction in Literature
Brianna Nelson of Iowa
Mary Zaborskis of New York

Hester Ann Corner Prize for Distinction in Literature-Foreign Language
Mairin O’Connor of New York

The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education Undergraduate Essay Prize
Kai Wang of Canada

The Georgette Chapman Phillips ’81 Scholarship
Elizabeth Lee of Delaware

Gail Ann Schweiter Prize
Melanie Shafer of Pennsylvania
Nora Schmidt of Minnesota

Thomas Raeburn White Scholarship
Shohini Bhattasali of India

Associate Professor of Anthropology Amanda Weidman will spend part of the 2012-13 academic year in India researching “playback singers” in Indian cinema, and the remainder of the year working on a new book she’s writing on the topic.

Weidman’s research in India and writing time are being supported by a combination of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Fulbright Program.

Weidman is a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow and one of only  six ACLS fellows to be appointed as an ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellow.

Playback singers are the singers used in popular Indian cinema for the elaborate song and dance numbers commonly used both in Tamil-language film industry, known as “Kollywood,”  which Weidman studies, and the more well-known Hindi-language film industry known as “Bollywood.”

See the below video for an example of playback singers in the recent Tamil movie Osthi.

“Set apart from the film narrative, song sequences play a central role in organizing affect and desire through sound and imagery,” says Weidman. “Song sequences also function as star vehicles, not only for the on-screen actors, but also for the behind-the-scenes vocalists.”

These singers are known as playback singers because their voices are first recorded in the studio and then “played back” on the set to be lip-synched by actors.

“Unlike Hollywood cinema,” Weidman says, “where a strong emphasis is placed on the supposed match between body and voice, Indian popular cinema does not mask the workings of technology in matching one body with another’s voice; in fact, it acknowledges the audience’s awareness and aesthetic appreciation of this fragmentation. Playback singers are celebrities in their own right. They also represent a type of performing musician that we are generally unfamiliar with in the U.S. context, different from the pop star or the singer-songwriter.

“Film songs, a central and ubiquitous element of India’s popular culture industry, are a means by which voices are powerfully linked to class, caste, community, gender, and regional/national identity.  Playback singing is thus a realm of vocality that has become intricately encoded with meaning,” says Weidman.

For her book, Weidman will examine playback singing within the context of the cultural politics of gender in post-Independence and now post-liberalization India.

She says, “In the 1950s, when playback singing became a profession, it offered women a way to be publicly known celebrities who were more respectable than actresses.  Those women purposely adopted a distinctly non-glamorous public persona.  But following India’s economic liberalization in the 1990s, the expectations for how female singers should look and sound have changed considerably.”

Based in Chennai (formerly Madras), Kollywood is the oldest of the South Indian film industries and rivals Bollywood, the Bombay-based Hindi-language film industry, in the numbers of films produced yearly; however, it has been much less studied.

“Both have abided by similar conventions for the female voice, but Kollywood has always featured a greater variety of female voices, making it an ideal context in which to explore the ways that female voices are variously invested with meaning,” says Weidman.

Tamil-speaking South India has been the focus of much of Weidman’s scholarship.  Weidman conducted research in Chennai for this project in 2002, 2004, and 2009-10, and for her previous project on the social history of South Indian classical (Karnatic) music in 1993, 1994, 1995-96, and 1997-98.

She will spend her time in India researching the history of playback singing, interviewing playback singers and others associated with the film industry, and observing playback singers and those around them in the recording studio, at performances, and at public appearances.

This project joins a growing area of anthropological research on the popular film industries of India as sites for examining broader cultural politics. However, Weidman’s focus on playback singing allows her to explore an aspect of women’s performance and participation in the public sphere that, in its cultural prominence, moves beyond the context of the film industry.

“My research pertains to a broad range of interests within South Asian studies, including media, popular culture, performance, and the transformation of the public sphere after economic liberalization, and I hope it will be of interest to scholars studying parallel phenomena in other regions of the world as well,” says Weidman.

Once again, Bryn Mawr is one of the top liberal-arts colleges in the country in the number of students winning the prestigious Fulbright awards, according to this chart posted on the Fulbright Student Program’s website. More than half of Bryn Mawr’s applicants received awards, giving the College a higher success rate than any other school on the list.

Here’s another look at Bryn Mawr’s 2012 Fulbright awardees:

Fourteen students presented research in the humanities and social sciences at the Hanna Holborn Gray Conference held in the Ely Room on Friday, Sept. 28.

This is the first year that the Hanna Holborn Gray Program held a formal conference for its fellows to present their findings. The idea came from graduate student mentors Jessica Lee and Mark Baugher, who hoped it would foster meaningful interdisciplinary conversations between fellows during and prior to the conference.

“Months ago, as part of the summer programming, the fellows talked through how they could see their projects relating to one another and envisioned various ways of setting up the panels,” says Assistant Dean and Director of Student Funding Isabella Barker. “I think it was a really successful format, in large part due to the conversations that took place, both about the content of the projects, but also about the experience of doing research more generally.”

Among those students participating was Lynne Ammar ’13 whose research focused on the current power struggle between moderate Islamists of the Ennahdha party and secular feminists in Tunisia. Ammar researched how feminist discourse has evolved to respond to changes in moderate Islamist political tactics that are not always outwardly hostile to women’s rights, but remain nonetheless regressive in nature. She also looked at the role social media has played within the political context.

Another student, Mary Margaret Peebles ’13, researched the trial of the McNamara Brothers, who bombed the Los Angeles Times and killed 20 employees in October of 1910. The arrest, grand jury investigation, trial, and subsequent bribery charge leveled against the trial attorney for the McNamara brothers was named “The Trial of the Century.” For her research, Peebles traveled to Los Angeles to conduct research in the Special Archives at UCLA and examined the intersection of justice, labor, journalism, and business interests in this historical event. She will be using this research from her Hanna Holborn Gray Fellowship to write her history thesis this fall.

Emily Scioscia ’13 focused her research on the question of whether curators can be considered artists. Scioscia employed methodologies used in the field of art history to analyze different art exhibits and compared the curatorial work of Albert Barnes of the Barnes’ Foundation with that of Fred Wilson, both of whom have used their curatorial work to challenge traditional conventions of the practice.

Vicki Sear ’13 spent the summer in Oklahoma researching the Osage language, a language from the Siouan family. Among other aspects of language and culture, Sear was looking for evidence of the existence of pre-aspiration in the Osage language, a rare phonetic characteristic that up to the present day has been identified only in Icelandic. In addition to her research in phonetics, she worked on a project constructing a Kaw language dictionary via historical linguistics. She traveled to the University of Kansas for the 2012 Siousan and Caddoan Language Conference. Her research this summer will contribute to her thesis in anthropology and linguistics.

To read summaries of all the participants’ research, visit the Hanna Holborn Gray Fellow’s site. Students interested in the Hanna Holborn Gray Fellowship should look for a general information session held later this semester or contact Isabelle Barker at ibarker@brynmawr.edu. Student requirements and further information about the fellowship can be found on their website.

The Hanna Holborn Gray Research Fellowship supports undergraduate research in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. Up to 15 students are selected each summer and have the opportunity to spend the summer conducting independent research. Students receive fellowships of $4500 while they do research that can either be the beginning of the senior thesis or a project that stands alone, but is relevant to their intellectual interests. The Andrew J. Mellon Foundation has funded this fellowship by giving Bryn Mawr College a grant in honor of Bryn Mawr alumna Hanna Holborn Gray, ’50 who served as Chair of the foundation’s Board of Trustees.

Samyuktha Natarajan ’15 was awarded a 2013 Newman Civic Fellows Award by Campus Compact. This award honors inspiring college student leaders who have demonstrated their investment in finding solutions to the challenges that face our communities throughout the country.

Natarajan is a student leader active in issues of public education and environmental justice. During her first two years of college, she has developed and implemented two projects at Parkway West High School, in West Philadelphia.

The first focused on engaging and empowering high school students to consider issues of food access, nutrition and community development in their neighborhoods, and included the creation of a community garden. The second focused on engaging high school English Language Learners in exploring issues of identity and culture and developing skills in self-expression through writing.

Samyuktha has been instrumental in the efforts of the College to build a partnership with Parkway West High School; she is an extraordinary organizer and systems-thinker and has been able to sustain both projects beyond her “field placements” by inspiring and collaborating with other college students, high school students, teachers, and community members. Samyuktha has been invited to serve as a student representative on the Praxis Steering Committee.

Parkway West High School is one of nine Philadelphia schools to take part in the Senior Project Initiative, which partners high schools with area colleges and universities to provide college-student mentors to high school seniors as they complete a rigorous yearlong research project. Bryn Mawr and Haverford students have worked as mentors through the Senior Project Initiative as well as in a variety of other capacities at the school.

At age six, Ellen Vari ’13 was less than happy that her parents enrolled her in an elementary school across town with a partial-immersion Spanish program.

“All the people that I knew up to that point were going to our neighborhood school, and I was going about 45 minutes away to a school with nobody that I knew. As a first grader, that was slightly jarring,” recalls Vari. “But my parents liked the idea that I would have exposure to a second language early in life.”

Vari quickly warmed up to her school and now that she’s going to be spending a year in Argentina as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant, the bus ride doesn’t seem like it was that long, at all.

“I’ve always wanted to go Argentina and the Fulbright combines my desire to travel with my knowledge of Spanish and strong interest in education that I developed at Bryn Mawr,” she said.

A psychology major with a dual minor in education and child and family studies, Vari credits her college experience as invaluable in preparing her for her Fulbright opportunity.

As part of her Praxis during her junior year, Vari co-taught intermediate English classes to a group of eight adults for whom English was not their native language.

“It was the first time I had ever been in charge of actually designing and implementing activities and curricula and so it was an experience that really solidified my interest in engaging with education as an instructor,” says Vari.

In addition to developing her teaching and Spanish language skills in Argentina, Vari says she hopes to “gain a better understanding and appreciation for the process of learning and teaching across a variety of contexts.”

Upon returning to the U.S., Vari plans to stay involved with education in some capacity, with an interest in receiving her teaching certification and teaching English as a second language to early elementary school students.

Bryn Mawr Class of 2015 members Serena Pierce, Chandrea Peng, Orsola Capovilla-Searle, Whitney López, and Esteniolla Maitre are the latest Mawrters to be named Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows.

Each fellow works over the course of two years with a professor-mentor on an individual research project. The Fellowship provides students with semester and summer grants that support their research. Weekly cohort meetings with Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) coordinators are also a key component of Bryn Mawr’s program.

“Every spring we select five promising students to be Mellon Mays Fellows, with the goal that they will enter Ph.D. programs in designated fields,” MMUF Administrative Coordinator Vanessa Christman explained.

The fellowship is intended for students from groups underrepresented in academia and/or who have demonstrated a commitment to the goals of MMUF: to reduce, over time, the serious underrepresentation on faculties of individuals from minority groups, as well as to address the consequences of these racial disparities for the educational system itself and for the larger society that it serves.

Bryn Mawr has been a partner in this effort since the beginnings of the MMUF program in 1988.

Meet this year’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate fellows:

Orsola Capovilla-Searle
Research Interest: Mathematical knots, specifically Legendrian knots.

Whitney P. López
Research Interest: The social and cultural factors contributing to the unemployment and underemployment of Black, Latina, and Southeast Asian women in North Philadelphia.

Esteniolla Maitre
Research Interest: How certain marginalized identities, particularly students from inner-city public school backgrounds, interact with English as both a language and an academic discipline.

Chandrea Peng
Research Interest: How schools facilitate–or fail to facilitate–development of identity, especially in students for whom the American education system is a challenge–language-wise, culture-wise, and class-wise. Also interested in themes of memory and identity in refugees and their children.

Serena Pierce
Research Interest: People who feel they are “in between” identities both racially and in terms of gender. Also interested in people from lower-class backgrounds at educational settings that have primarily served those from the middle and upper class.

On May 3, current MMUF seniors will present their research in an afternoon program to which all Bryn Mawr community members are invited. The event begins at 3:30 p.m. in Wyndham’s Ely Room.

The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program is one of many programs coordinated by Bryn Mawr’s Pensby Center.

The Pensby Center (formerly The Office of Intercultural Affairs) implements programs and activities that address issues of diversity, power and privilege, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, country of origin, class, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation and disability, with a goal of improving the campus climate and enhancing community life at Bryn Mawr College.

The Dalun Community Fellowships (formerly known as the Simli Centre Internships) are now accepting applications for their summer 2014 program.

Launched in 2013, these fellowships are a 10-week experience in Dalun, Ghana. Each student is assigned a specific project and mentor while engaging with community-based learning and action.

The goal of the fellowship is to unite ideas, theory, and learning with practice. Students will expand research on community-based literacy in Dalun, plan a teacher training workshop with faculty from the University of Development Studies, take Dagbani classes, and become active participants within the Dalun community.

The fellowships emphasize engagement with local youth programs and schools. Partner organizations in Dalun include the Titagya Schools, Simli Radio, Dalun Community Youth House, Dalun Simli Centre, and the Dalun ICT Centre.

Last summer’s pilot program included five Bi-Co students, a student from College of the Holy Cross, and a research fellow from the Teachers College of Columbia University. All participants are hosted by the Simli Centre, a guest center and workshop space.

A proposed course in the fall of 2014 will facilitate ongoing reflection, research, and analysis of the summer experience.

Applications are due Sunday, February 9, 2014 at 11:59 p.m. and are available through the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship online system. Applicants are strongly encouraged to contact Alice Lesnick (alesnick@brynmawr.edu), Theresa Cann (tcann@brynmawr.edu), Esteniolla Maitre (emaitre@brynmawr.edu) or Andrew Garza (Andrew.a.garza@gmail.com) for an informational interview.

— Ivy Gray-Klein ’14

Ashley Hahn’s lifelong passion for community service began when she was barely a toddler, tagging along with her father at local fire department events in her hometown of Allamuchy, N.J. At Bryn Mawr, the same commitment to community drew the psychology and political science double major to the Praxis program, where she was able to develop her career aspirations as an advocate for victims of abuse. “I’m kind of obsessed with helping people — it’s what I want to do for my career and it’s what I’ve been focused on in my community service and academically,” she said.

Hahn’s aspirations toward advocacy come from a deeply personal place: she is a survivor of child abuse and others close to her are survivors of domestic violence.

In her first Praxis experience, Hahn worked with children between the ages of three and six with psychological, behavioral, and emotional issues in a Norristown preschool intervention program as part of an educational psychology course taught by now-President Kim Cassidy. That opportunity evolved into a summer internship through an Alumnae Regional Scholarship in her sophomore year.

In the summer of her junior year, Hahn was awarded the CEO Summer of Service internship and began a volunteer position as a domestic violence counselor at the Women’s Center of Montgomery County where she became interested in the legal process surrounding domestic violence law.

When the opportunity arose for the summer internship to extend into a yearlong volunteer position as a court advocate for victims of domestic violence, Hahn was encouraged by several of her professors to incorporate the opportunity into a Praxis Level 3 course.

“All of my professors have been so supportive of everything I do, whether it be applying for a fellowship, or law schools, or applying for an internship,” she said. “My Praxis faculty advisor, [Professor of Social Work and Director of the Law and Social Policy Program] Raymond Albert, really helped me think about things in ways that I’ve never thought about before and helps me tackle major philosophical and ethical debates that I’ve encountered as a court advocate.”

Hahn now serves as a domestic violence counselor, domestic violence court advocate, and a court-appointed special advocate for children.

Her experience directly informs her political science thesis, which will examine victim empowerment and paternalistic intervention for justification in situations of domestic violence. The experience also inspired her post-graduation plans as a Thomas J. Watson fellow, where she will travel to the United Kingdom, Australia, Guatemala, Brazil, Kenya, and Ghana to research the approaches taken by organizations in different societies and cultures to assist children recovering from traumas such as abuse, exploitation, poverty, and armed conflict.

“This is honestly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to combine my passion for helping children with my desire to travel,” she said. “Through the experience, I hope to explore my identity as an abuse survivor and learn different approaches to helping children that I can utilize as a political and legal advocate for abuse victims.”

Hahn’s advocacy has spread to the campus community, as well. As a hall advisor, she invited staff from the Women’s Center of Montgomery County to give presentations on domestic violence as part of hall advisor training. Hahn said she finds her commitment to support and service reflected beyond the classroom as a natural, dynamic part of the campus community.

“In a way, these experiences are bridging all of these gaps and are arguably about helping the community itself grow and experience more things, more than just myself.”

In 2015, after completing her Watson fellowship, Hahn plans to attend law school.

Thirteen members of the Class of 2015 have been named Hanna Holborn Gray Research Fellows and will spend their summer on research interests spanning Medieval Iberia to 2020 Tokyo.

The Andrew J. Mellon Foundation has given Bryn Mawr College a grant in honor of Bryn Mawr alumna Hanna Holborn Gray, ’50 who served as chair of the foundation’s Board of Trustees. These funds are used to support undergraduate research in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.

Up to 15 students are selected each summer and have the opportunity to spend the summer conducting independent research. Students receive fellowships of $4,500 while they do research that can either be the beginning of the senior thesis or a project that stands alone, but is relevant to their intellectual interests.

Meet this year’s Hanna Holborn Gray Research Fellowship Recipients:

Tabatha Barton ’15

Research Project: The presence of minor agrarian divinities in the harvest festivals of Rome and their relationship to Saturn. A study of the literature and archaeological evidence from the Roman forum beginning with the archaic through the early empire.

Stephanie Bredbenner ’15

Research Project: A Cultural Crossroads:  Coexistence, Conflict, and Intellectual Exchange in Medieval Iberia

Maya Felman ’15

Research Project: St. Clare’s in the Colonies: Echoes of Enid Blyton

Sarah Ferrieri ’15

Research Project: Depictions of Disease and Medicine in the Art of Colonial Latin America

Sofia Javed ’15

Research Project: Hindu-Islamic Relations Post the Partition: The Conflict in the Population’s Collective Memory

Xue Jin ’15

Research Project: The Rhetoric of the 2020 Olympics and the Sustainable Tokyo Concept

Ailun (Ellen) Li ’15

Research Project:  Who is the Lawbreaker? Sino-Hong Kong Relationship under the One Country Two Systems Policy

Allegra Tomass  Massaro ’15

Research Project: Philanthropies in Philadelphia: Understanding Their Role in the Urban Agenda

Eileen Morgan ’15

Research Project: A Taste for the Past: Medieval Food and Modern Palates

Leigh Peterson ’15

Research Project: Appropriating Iconography: Roger II Use of Byzantine Imperial Iconography in Royal Norman-Sicilian Architecture

Angela  Rosenberg ’15

Research Project:  A Novel Reboot: Videogames as a Narrative Form

Pamudu Tennakoon ’15

Research Project: Postcolonial Elites and Colonial Architecture

Diana Corrado ’15

Research Project: Does Anything Lie Beneath Everything?:  Sincerity and Authenticity in the Age of Ideology

Katherine Marcoux’s passion for  learning languages began at a young age. As a child, her family moved to Italy and then Japan, where she immersed herself in the different cultures and languages. In high school, she studied French and Spanish, took a semester of Mandarin, and continued to study Japanese.

“I think being exposed to so many different languages at a young age really piqued my interest in other languages later on,” says Katherine. “I just love learning them.”

It was at Bryn Mawr that Katherine, a recent recipient of a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship that will take her to the tiny country of Andorra, began seriously considering teaching language. During her four years here, she began focusing her major on linguistics, Spanish, and Japanese. She spent her fall semester junior year abroad in Barcelona, where she had the opportunity to volunteer as a teacher’s aid at a private school teaching English to first and third graders. She was also a teacher’s assistant for an intermediate Spanish class in the fall semester of her senior year.

“What I like about teaching is getting across my enthusiasm and love for the language, even though it might not be the student’s favorite class,” she says.

Katherine’s decision to spend her Fulbright year in Andorra stems from her study abroad in Barcelona, where she was introduced to the Catalan language, the official language of Andorra, and promptly began studying it.

“In Barcelona, they speak Spanish and Catalan,” says Katherine “It fascinated me to observe when people decided to use which language and in what context. I then came back and took Haverford’s ‘Politics of the Spanish Speaking World’ and the two prompted me to write my senior thesis on Catalan and how it’s prestige had changed over the years.”

Katherine hopes to not only teach English while in Andorra, but also be able to observe her thesis research firsthand, as well as immerse herself in the culture.

“I have found that the best way to get to know a community is by being involved, and it is through day-to-day interactions that you learn about each others’ cultures and customs and realize how similar we are in the end, despite the differences of language and location.”

Bryn Mawr Creative Writing Program faculty member J.C. Todd is one of 12 Philadelphia artists granted a 2014 Pew Fellowship.

In awarding Todd the fellowship, the Pew Foundation noted:
“J.C. Todd’s (b. 1943) poems investigate the impact of war, with an insistent eye and ear on language. Her current project, War Zone, explores containments and outbursts of resistance, with sonnets that ‘complicate and contemporize the tradition of war poems. ‘Todd’s writing seeks out the tender moments that exist in contrast to devastation. ‘If language bears the trace of war, how can that be revealed and perhaps shaken loose?’ she asks.” (more)

At Bryn Mawr, Todd has taught Introduction to Creative Writing, Writing Poetry I and Writing Poetry II. For the coming academic year, she’ll be teaching an Emily Balch Seminar titled “The Journey: Act and Metaphor,” Poetry Writing II and ENG 125.

Todd holds a bachelor’s degree in literature from Duquesne University and an 
M. F. A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  She is the author of the book of poems, What Space This Body (Wind Publications, 2008) and two chapbooks, Entering Pisces (Pine Press, 1985) and Nightshade (Pine Press, 2000; finalist for the Flume Press Chapbook Award).  Her poems have appeared in such periodicals as American Poetry Review,Atlanta Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Bryn Mawr students Alizeh Amer ‘16, Rebekah Adams ’15, and Ariana Hall ’17 are now more than half-way through their Dalun Community Fellowships in Ghana. Haverford Students Kathleen Tsai ’16 and Brandon Alston ’14 are also participating in the fellowship program, which is administered by Haverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship.

The students were recently joined in Ghana by Term Professor of Education Alice Lesnick, who is detailing her travels on her blog.

Lesnick first traveled to Ghana in March 2012 as part of the 360° “Learning and Narrating Childhoods.”

Formerly known as the Simli Centre Internships, the goal of the fellowships is to unite ideas, theory, and learning with practice. Students expand research on community-based literacy in Dalun, plan a teacher training workshop with faculty from the University of Development Studies, take Dagbani classes, and become active participants within the Dalun community.

The fellowships emphasize engagement with local youth programs and schools. Partner organizations in Dalun include the Titagya schools, Simli Radio, Dalun Community Youth House, Dalun Simli Centre, and the Dalun ICT Centre.

The fellowship program was piloted last summer and included five Bi-Co students, a student from College of the Holy Cross, and a research fellow from the Teachers College of Columbia University. All participants are hosted by the Simli Centre, a guest center and workshop space.

Rachel Weissler, Maria Morrero, Lucy Carreno-Roca, Rochelle Waite and Kat Abraham

Bryn Mawr’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program has announced the Class of 2016 Mellon Mays Fellows:

• Lucy Carreno-Roca of Alvarado, Texas. Lucy is an English major.
• Maria Morrero of Philadelphia, Pa. Maria is a cultural anthropology major.
• Rochelle Waite of Cambridge, Mass. Rochelle is an anthropology major.
• Rachel Weissler of Topanga, Calif. Rachel is a linguistics major.
• Kathiana Abraham of Hyde Park, Mass. Kat is a mathematics major.

Celebrating its 25th year, the MMUF program identifies and supports students of great promise with the goal of helping them to become scholars of the highest distinction who go on to transform the academy. The new fellows above will join those from the class of 2015, who are beginning their second year with the program.

The MMUF is a national program that serves to increase the number of minority students, and others with a demonstrated commitment to eradicating racial disparities, who will pursue Ph.D.s in core fields in the arts and sciences.

Fellows conduct extended research projects in their junior and senior years, frequently presenting at conferences. Mellon Mays fellows who enroll in Ph.D. programs in the designated fields within 39 months of college graduation are eligible for repayment of their undergraduate loans up to $10,000. The Social Science Research Council and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation partner with the Mellon Mays program to support travel and research grants for fellows during graduate school, as they finish their dissertations, and into their careers as junior faculty members.

Guided research is the foundation of the fellowship, and each fellow works closely with a faculty mentor. For details about current fellows’ research, visit the program website.

In addition to meeting regularly with a faculty mentor, all Mellon Mays fellows meet as a cohort each week with Assistant Dean Vanessa Christman, who serves as the MMUF administrative coordinator, and Growth and Structure of Cities Professor Gary McDonough, who serves as the MMUF faculty coordinator. University of Pennsylvania doctoral student Leslie Jones joins the program this year as a graduate coordinator.

Bryn Mawr is one of eight institutions that have participated in the MMUF program since its inception in 1988; the program now operates at 42 colleges and universities.

For more information, visit the MMUF website.

Call someone an iconoclast today and you’re most likely thinking she’s a rebel, a non-conformist, an individualist.

But back in 8^th-century Byzantium, you would have meant something quite different. Derived from the Greek word for image-breaker, an iconoclast was someone who believed that religious icons were idolatrous.

“From 726 to 843, the veneration of icons was officially banned in Orthodox worship,” explains Alicia Walker ’94, an assistant professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr, “and Byzantine Iconoclasm spurred theological reflection on the corporeal versus spiritual nature of Christ and the saints.”

A specialist in gender issues in the art and material culture of Byzantium, Walker is particularly interested in the impact of these religious debates on Byzantine attitudes about human bodies, especially women’s bodies. For her current project, Christian Bodies, Pagan Images: Women, Beauty, and Morality in Medieval Byzantium, she has received a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, awarded annually by the American Council of Learned Societies.

“Prior to Iconoclasm,” explains Walker, “women affiliated themselves with pagan goddesses in direct ways, for example, by wearing jewelry and clothing decorated with images of Athena or Aphrodite.” But after the Iconoclastic period, pagan goddesses and other female figures continued to appear in works of art, but not on objects worn by Christian women.

In looking at the transformations in Byzantine conceptions of the female body and attitudes toward adornment, Walker aims to shed light on how both Christian and Classical traditions contributed to the regulation of women’s corporeal morality and the formation of female selfhood in medieval Byzantium.

The Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, supports scholars embarking on ambitious, large-scale research projects at critical stages in their academic careers. Since 2002, Ryskamp Fellowships have supported early-career professors in the humanities whose scholarly contributions have advanced their fields and who have well-designed plans for new research.

Interested in Walker’s research? Read more here.

From an early age, Ekaterina (Katia) Vlasova ’15 found comfort in silence.

“From childhood, my fondest memories were of spending summers in the countryside of St. Petersburg, immersed in a serene Russian forest in the summertime,” says Katia. “Tagging alongside my mother, I would venture into the seemingly endless space of silence and stillness, amidst the immensely tall pines and birch trees.”

Now, after having taken a 360° that looked at contemplative traditions, biology-major Katia has received a Watson Fellowship to examine the role such moments play in our physical health.

“We must shift from the treatment paradigm to that of prevention,” says Katia. “In order to do this, we must listen closely to other philosophies of healing. By engaging with mind-body practices within contemplative communities, I hope to learn how other cultures of healing approach questions of illness and health, and how mindfulness can be used as form of preventative medicine.”

During her Watson year, Katia plans to stay in communities of contemplation and healing in Germany, Japan, Thailand, Bhutan, India, and Peru. In order to learn how each community perceives the connection between mindfulness, mind-body practices, and healing, she will approach these spaces from two perspectives: as an observer and as a participant.

Questions Katia plans to examine include: How do contemplatives view the connection between mindfulness and health? How are meditation, yoga, prayer, and ritual used as a means of healing? What motives bring students to seek mind-body practices? Can the healing power of contemplation and ritual reach beyond the self to affect larger communities and the connections we share to the natural world? Is there potential for more integration of mind-body practices into our Western philosophy of healing as a means of preventative medicine?

Although Katia’s passion for alternative and integrative approaches to healing surfaced during her time at Bryn Mawr, particularly when taking part in the Contemplative Traditions 360°, its underlying roots have been present for the majority of her life, planted by her mother, who died of breast cancer when Katia was 13, after the family had moved to Huntingdon Valley, Pa, in the United States.

“My love of biology and fascination with understanding health first began with the close connection I feel to nature, which was always encouraged by my mother, a devoted botanist,” says Katia. “She would share her knowledge of medicinal herbs, berries, and edible mushrooms with me, encouraging me to establish a meaningful connection with the nature around me.”

Katia remembers the struggle her mother had, not just with her illness but with people’s response to her inquiry into alternatives to traditional Western treatments, and hopes to honor her mother’s memory with her project.

“The lesson of her journey was not lost on me,” says Katia. “The lack of support came not from lack of care, but from the stubborn refusal to consider alternative philosophies towards healing with an open mind. Now, I carry her story with me. It fuels my passion for seeking to understand these philosophies, which are often so different from our own Western ideas and ways of seeing the world.”

The Watson is a rare window of time after college and pre-career for fellows to engage their deepest interest on a world scale. Fellows conceive original projects, execute them outside of the United States for one year, and embrace the ensuing journey. They decide where to go, who to meet, and when to change course. The one-year stipend is $30,000. For more information, visit the Watson Foundation website.

Information on the many fellowships available to Bryn Mawr students can be found online.

Mikayla Holland ’15 has been awarded a Boren Scholarship to study the Russian language at the Flagship Language Program at Al-Farabi National Kazakh University in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

“While my primary area of interest is Russia, I value the opportunity to study in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in the coming year,” says Mikayla. “Central Asia is a fascinating melting pot of cultures, connecting Asia, Russia, the Caucuses, and the Middle East. Learning to navigate the cultural complexity of the region will improve my cultural fluency. In addition, the different accents, dialects, and languages will present their own challenges linguistically that will make my mastery of Russian more flexible, adaptable, and fluent.”

David L. Boren Scholarships and Fellowships are sponsored by the National Security Education Program (NSEP), a major federal initiative designed to build a broader and more qualified pool of U.S. citizens with foreign language and international skills.

Mikayla’s program includes intensive classes for second language learners, direct enrollment in the university, homestays with Kazakh families, and an internship component at a local organization.

From Atlanta, Mikayla began learning Russian with the goal of reading her favorite Russian classics in the original.

While in first-year Russian at Bryn Mawr, she discovered that she was also fascinated by the language itself, and now is interested in translation and interpretation.

“I came to love Russian culture through literature like Crime and Punishment and The Master and Margarita,” says Mikayla. “After enrolling in Beginning Russian, I discovered that few things fascinated me like the complex grammar and sheer aural beauty of the Russian language.”

Mikayla’s studies, especially an academic year abroad in Moscow during the 2013-14 school year, kindled a late-blooming fascination with politics and current events. A recent vacation to Kiev during the violent protests there intensified her interest.

“Understanding volatile political situations such as the one in Ukraine requires on-the-ground knowledge, extensive reading in several languages, and an understanding of the historical and cultural context of the situation,” says Mikayla. “I began to realize that I could do more with my training than translate texts in a university; I could use my skills to help fight crime, stabilize relations between the United States and Russia, or help immigrants in need find better lives for themselves. “

Boren Awards provide U.S. undergraduate and graduate students with resources and encouragement to acquire language skills and experience in countries critical to the future security and stability of our nation. In exchange for funding, Boren award recipients agree to work in the federal government for a period of at least one year.

The Bryn Mawr College Department of Russian offers an undergraduate program of study that has become nationally and internationally renowned. Our program in Russian language is designed to help students successfully attain an advanced level of oral proficiency in Russian by the time they graduate. In addition to language courses at all levels, students have the opportunity to take a variety of courses in Russian literature, linguistics, history, cinema, and culture; department majors concentrate in one particular area of study.

Information on the many fellowships available to Bryn Mawr students can be found online.