Earlier this month, nine students at Johns Hopkins
learned they will be headed abroad for the 2004-2005
academic year, thanks to two prestigious awards
administered by the Institute of International Education.
Three undergraduates and four graduate students received
Fulbright Scholar grants that will take them to locales
including India, Malaysia, Egypt and Germany.
Two graduate students in the History of Art Department
are also headed to Germany, having each earned a
scholarship known as the DAAD from the German Academic
Exchange Service, funded by the German government. The
programs typically attract the same applicants, so they
work closely together on many issues, most notably to avoid
giving grants to the same people, according to John Bader,
assistant dean in the Krieger School's Office of Academic
Advising.
Bader, a Fulbright scholar who traveled to India and
now helps Hopkins students apply for such awards, said in a
message announcing the news to administrators, "I cannot
help the pride I feel for these students and for Hopkins
faculty who have prepared such remarkable people for an
extraordinary experience."
Created in 1946, the Fulbright Program aims to
increase mutual understanding between the people of the
United States and other countries through the exchange of
people, knowledge and skills. The program awards
approximately 1,000 grants annually and currently operates
in more than 140 countries. Successful U.S. applicants
utilize their grants to undertake self-designed programs in
a broad range of disciplines including the social sciences,
business, communication, performing arts, physical
sciences, engineering and education.
DAAD, which stands for Deutscher Akademischer
Austausch-dienst, is a private, publicly funded,
self-governing organization of higher education
institutions in Germany. The association promotes
international academic relations and cooperation by
offering mobility programs primarily for students and
faculty but also for administrators and others in the
higher education realm.
Seven students have been named Fulbright scholars.
Sally McGrane, 29, earned a master's degree
from the Writing Seminars in 2003 and will travel to
Germany to deepen her understanding of the country and its
literary traditions. McGrane is a journalist whose pieces
have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers,
including The New York Times, which has published nearly 30
of her articles about technology, business and travel.
Barkha Gurbani, 21, is a senior who will
receive her bachelor's degree in public health on May 20.
Graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Barkha will be a Fulbright
Scholar to India, the second consecutive year Johns Hopkins
has sent a graduating senior to that country on a
Fulbright. She will be conducting research at AIDS Research
and Control Center in Mumbai and completing a public
service project for women widowed by AIDS. Gurbani is also
earning a minor in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and
wrote her senior thesis about the feminization of the AIDS
epidemic.
Jacquelyn Williamson, 31, is a graduate student
in the Near Eastern Studies Department working with Betsy
Bryan and Richard Jasnow. She will use the Fulbright grant
to Egypt to examine an unstudied artistic motif in ancient
Egyptian art in museums and on important archaeological
sites. Fulbright awards are rarely granted to
Egyptologists.
Ami Karnik is a senior who will receive her
bachelor's degree in international studies. She will use
her Fulbright to travel to Malaysia to study the
integration of the ASEAN common market using the Malay-sian
electronics industry as a case study. She is the founder of
the Hopkins Diplomat, the first undergraduate journal on
international affairs. She has worked in the Maryland
Governor's Office and conducted independent research in
India, where she was born. Karnik also studied abroad at
SAIS in Bologna, Italy.
Emily Stecker, 21, is a senior who majored in
English. She won a Fulbright to teach English in South
Korea but has declined it in favor of Princeton in Asia, a
program run through Princeton University. She will be
teaching English at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang,
Malaysia. She is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor
society and is a tutor at the university's Writing Center.
Stecker is an accomplished violinist who plays with the
Hopkins Symphony Orchestra, winning its Shriver Hall Award
this year. She has also played at Tanglewood, Interlochen
and in the Czech Republic. She is building on her
international experience of teaching at St. Agnes School in
South Africa and will conduct a side project on indigenous
instruments.
Edward W. Monroe Jr., 33, will earn a master's
degree in science and math education from SBSBE this month.
He will use his Fulbright grant to travel to Bulgaria to
pursue environmental studies. It will be a return trip for
Monroe, a science teacher at the Washington Math Science
Technology Public Charter High School in Washington, D.C.,
who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria from 1995 to
1997. He plans to create a field guide for high school
students on the geology and history of stone built
structures.
Jill M. Pederson, 32, will travel to Italy to
explore the relationship between painting and poetry in the
court of Milan from 1480 to 1499. Pederson, who earned a
bachelor's degree from Colorado College and a master's from
George Washington University, is a doctoral candidate in
the History of Art Department at Johns Hopkins.
The two DAAD scholars traveling to Germany are
Lynette Roth and Amanda Hockensmith.
Roth will study controversial realists in German art
in the period of 1918 to 1933. A doctoral candidate in
History of Art with a bachelor's degree from the University
of Michigan, she will travel to Cologne and focus on the
Cologne Progressives and their association with
photographer August Sander.
Hockensmith, 29, will study the dadaist Kurt
Schwitters, his multimedia art and the economic conditions
of post-World War I Hanover. She is a doctoral candidate in
the History of Art Department and received her bachelor's
degree from Williams College.
For more information on the Fulbright and DAAD
programs, go to
http://www.iie.org (for Fulbright) or
http://www.daad.org/about/daad.htm (for DAAD).
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