Eleven graduate students or recent alumni of Johns
Hopkins have earned the opportunity to study abroad during
the 2005-2006 academic year, thanks to two prestigious
awards administered by the Institute of International
Education.
Four newly minted undergraduate degree holders and
five graduate students received Fulbright Scholar grants.
Two additional affiliates 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
the two work closely together on many issues, most notably
to avoid giving grants to the same people, according to
John Bader, associate dean for academic programs and
advising in
the Krieger School.
Bader, a former Fulbright scholar who traveled to
India and now helps Johns Hopkins students apply for such
awards, said, "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 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,
communications, 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 higher
education.
Nine students have been named Fulbright scholars.
Jeremy Caradonna, 25, a doctoral candidate in
the History Department, will travel to France to study the
academic essay competitions of 18th-century France and
investigate how they provided a public venue for expression
of Enlightenment ideas. Caradonna earned his bachelor's in
comparative history of ideas and history at the University
of Washington in 2003.
Rachel Hadler, 21, will travel to Berlin to
explore how the relationship between Germans and Russians
has evolved over the past 50 years. She will interview
Berliners about their experiences of the Russian presence
in Berlin, and will explore the Soviet role in shaping the
city's identity. After her work abroad, she plans to pursue
a career in medicine. Hadler received her bachelor's degree
in international studies from Johns Hopkins in December
2004.
Emily Kaplan, 22, will travel to the
Netherlands to participate in Utrecht University's 11-month
master's degree program in conflict studies and human
rights. She will study violent conflict and cases of human
rights abuses and their prevention. Kaplan also plans to
obtain a volunteer internship at the International Criminal
Tribunal for Yugoslavia and aims to base her master's
thesis on an aspect of her work there. A Writing Seminars
major, Kaplan received her bachelor's degree from Hopkins
in May.
Marissa Lowman, 21, received a teaching
assistantship grant and will teach English as a second
language at a German high school. She plans to foster a
cross-cultural exchange between her German students and a
class of American high schoolers by setting up video
conferencing sessions and a contemporary literature book
club for the two groups. Lowman's long-term goals include a
career as an educator and a novelist. Lowman received her
bachelor's degree, majoring in the Writing Seminars and
German, from Johns Hopkins in May.
Mary Ashburn Miller, 24, a doctoral candidate
in the History Department, will travel to France to
research explanations and interpretations of violence
during the French Revolution, primarily through an analysis
of festivals that commemorated violent acts. She will also
explore the ways in which these explanations reveal a
revolutionary understanding of violence as both natural and
necessary. Miller holds a master's degree in history from
Johns Hopkins and earned her bachelor's degree in political
and social thought and in French at the University of
Virginia.
Meaghan Mulholland, 26, will travel to Italy to
study the Sicilian puppet theater, the opera dei pupi. Her
research will culminate in a novel that will chronicle a
Sicilian family's efforts to preserve its heritage in a
changing world. Mulholland has worked as a researcher and
writer for the National Geographic Society since 2002. She
is currently pursuing a master's degree in fiction from the
writing program in the Krieger School's Advanced Academic
Programs. She earned her bachelor's degree in English and
creative writing from Boston College in 2001.
Ashish Patel, 22, will travel to India to
identify children on the west coast who are carriers of the
beta-thalassemia blood disorder and at risk for iron
deficiency anemia. He will administer iron therapy,
nutritional counseling and genetic counseling. Patel plans
to enter medical school when he returns to the United
States. He received his bachelor's degree in biomedical
engineering and anthropology from Johns Hopkins in May.
David Schrag, 37, a doctoral candidate in
anthropology, will travel to Germany to conduct an
ethnographic study of secondary education reform and
citizenship in East Berlin. Schrag contends that the public
education system there is an entity through which the
government simultaneously acknowledges the social and
cultural differences between people who once lived on
opposite sides of the Berlin Wall and tries to overcome the
barriers standing in the way of a shared national identity
and full participatory citizenship. Schrag plans to
interview teachers trained in the former East Germany about
changes they have undergone and ask students ages 18 to 20
what it means to be German, Eastern and European. Schrag
earned his bachelor's degree in psychology and German at
Bethel College in Kansas. He holds a master's in cognitive
psychology from Kansas State and a master's in anthropology
from the University of Kansas.
Molly Warsh, 27, a doctoral candidate in the
History Department, will travel to Lisbon, Portugal, to
study the Portuguese role in the pearl trade of the 16th
and 17th centuries. She will analyze the trade's
development in the context of the Portuguese empire. She
earned her bachelor's degree in 1999 from Cornell
University, where she was honored for excellence in
historical scholarship.
The two DAAD recipients are Jennifer Kingsley
and Thanh H. Nguyen.
Kingsley, 27, will study the patronage of
Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim through the lens of his
famous Gospels of 1015. Her research will deal with
questions of memory and collecting in medieval Germany by
examining the way that Bernward recorded his place in
society through his art patronage. The project takes as its
focus one of Bernward's more famous commissions, a richly
decorated gospel book. Kingsley, a graduate of Williams
College, is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art
Department.
Nguyen, who earned her doctoral degree in
environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins in May,
declined her DAAD scholarship to accept the Gaylord
Donnelley Environmental Fellowship from Yale Institute of
Biospheric Studies at Yale University. She will study the
transport and fate of DNA in soil that potentially affects
horizontal gene transfer and therefore influences soil
microbial diversity. Her work will examine the role of
mineral types, DNA properties, solution chemistry (pH and
ionic strength) and other soil macromolecules on DNA
adsorption. Nguyen hopes her project will improve our
understanding of environmental factors affecting horizontal
gene transfer in soil environments, and subsequently soil
microbial diversity.
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