ÈËÆÞÓÕ»ó

Eliot Circular

Our Brilliant Students

Smiles all ‘round: Fulbright winners Elizabeth Wilder ’11, Kerstin Rosero ’11, Jessica Mercado ’11, and Margit Bowler ’11 outflank Presdent Diver (wearing the tie, in case you weren’t sure). Photo by Kevin Myers

Saluting Margit Bowler ’11, Colin Chapman ’10, Erik Erkkila ’11, Jessica Mercado ’11, Kerstin Rosero ’11, Elizabeth Wilder ’11, Daniel Carranza ’12, Collin Perkinson ’13, Joseph Conlon ’11, and Allison Tepper ’11.

By Randall S. Barton

Six ÈËÆÞÓÕ»ó students won Fulbright Scholarships to support study or teaching overseas. Recipients include:

Linguistics major Margit Bowler ’11 will travel to Australia to focus on Walpiri, an endangered Australian Aboriginal language spoken by 3,000 people in the Northern Territory.

Psychology major Colin Chapman ’10 will research eating behavior with Dr. Helgi Schioth at Uppsala University in Sweden, investigating a specific transporter in the hypothalamus to see if it may be partially responsible for cravings, and, ultimately, obesity.

Classics major Erik Erkkila ’11 will teach English in Turkey. He looks forward to understanding the ways that the ancient history of the country informs its modern history.

History major Jessica Mercado ’11 is looking forward to teaching English in Germany, where she spent her junior year and, between semesters, taught English at a camp for German children.

German major Kerstin Rosero ’11 will join the Teaching Assistant Diversity Program in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, where she will be a language assistant at a high school that has a large number of students with immigrant backgrounds.

English major Elizabeth Wilder ’11 will teach English in Montenegro. She is enthusiastic about southeastern European literature and hopes to make a career translating and publishing more of it into English.

German major Daniel Carranza ’12 won a Beinecke Scholarship, presented each year to 20 students nationally who have demonstrated superior levels of intellectual ability, scholastic achievement, and personal promise to pursue opportunities in humanities or the social sciences.

Chemistry/physics major Collin Perkinson ’13 won the Goldwater Scholarship, awarded to sophomores and juniors with outstanding potential who intend to pursue a career in math or the natural sciences.

Classics major Joseph Conlon ’11 won the Class of ’21 Award, recognizing an outstanding senior thesis, for his thesis on solving interpretive problems in Virgil’s Georgics (see What is a ÈËÆÞÓÕ»óie?). Adviser Wally Englert [classics 1981–] says, “In each of the poem’s three main chapters, Joseph looked at a problematic section, discussed previous scholarship on it, and, through a combination of brilliant work on the theory of genre and close reading of individual passages, proposed original readings of each of the three sections. In addition, his senior thesis oral was outstanding.” Joseph is beginning a graduate program at Princeton University.

Art major Allison Tepper ’11 also won the Class of ’21 Award for her exploration of outsider artist Melvin Edward Nelson. “There is no academic scholarship on this self-taught artist who worked as an electrician and inventor for most of his life and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia,” explains her thesis adviser, Dana Katz [art 2005–]. “Although Allie could have turned to the vast literature on Outsider Art (or Art Brut), she did not want to anchor her discussion of Nelson’s art in terms of his biography or pathology. Instead, she conceptualized his working method as an alchemical process that artfully records territory. The story she tells of Nelson’s work marries process with product to examine the artist’s practice in cartographic terms. This thesis is a brilliant testament to Allie’s visual acuity, analytical criticality, and creative chutzpah.” Allie recently won an internship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.