2000 - 2001 Centennial Scholars
Alyssa Boxhill based her project on three
years' worth of experience designing personal websites.
Her exploration of the dynamics of "creative web
culture" and the use of the Internet as a medium
of creative and personal expression -- by herself
and others -- included a trip around the country
interviewing other young designers of personal websites.
She plans to incorporate video footage of these
interviews into a collaborative and interactive
website, one that will demonstrate in detail the
experience of what it means to be a "web geek goddess."
Alyssa is an English major.
Maureen Chun is working on creative writing
for her Centennial Scholars project. She spent the
summer in Berlin writing short fiction that looks
at the relationship between identity and travel.
She is particularly interested in exploring the
way in which sentimentality mingles with perceptions
of strangeness in travel. A comparative literature
major with a concentration in English and German
literatures, Maureen works with Peter Carey of Barnard's
English Department.
Shelley Lavin is investigating how a city
presents itself to a traveler. She spent ten weeks
sketching, photographing, and writing about nine
European cities. Since then, Shelley has continued
to work with the themes and patterns that exist
within and between these different cities. The culmination
of her project will be an exhibition of photographic
and mixed media works based on her experiences and
explorations. Shelley is an architecture major and
her mentor is Kevin Falco of Columbia University's
School of the Arts.
Anastasiya Lebedev's project brings together
three strands of cross-cultural and cross-sexual
experience: women from Russian history who adopted
various kinds of traditionally masculine personae;
contemporary Russian transsexuals whom she explores
as modern cross-sexual experimenters; and her own
experience as a Russian-born woman whose childhood
emigration to the U.S. and recent visit to Russia
has led her to develop her own story of cross-identity.
Her project's three interests correspond to the
three media she brings together in her final CD-based
presentation: histories by and about Russian women,
taped interviews with Russian transsexuals, and
her own diaries and letters. A computer science
major, Anastasiya works with Catherine Nepomnyashchy
of Barnard's Slavic Department.
Rosemary Moulton's project involves a series
of psychological experiments that examine the effects
of intimacy motivation and eavesdropping upon loneliness.
Eavesdropping is a topic of interest that closely
relates to voyeurism and the media. The question
that Rosemary is posing is: Does a person's need
to be intimate affect the way one feels after listening
to a clip of Jerry Springer or Jerry Maguire? Will
people who want intimate relationships feel more
lonely after hearing a clip with very little intimacy
(Jerry Springer) or very high intimacy (Jerry Maguire)?
Rosemary is a psychology major and her mentor is
Barbara Woike of Barnard's Psychology Department.
Sally Oswald is writing for and about choruses,
that body of people who respond to and tell the
stories of Greek Tragedy. In her play, Goat Songs,
she drew on the power of polyphonic speech to highlight
the tension of individuals living in and out of
collectives in and out of society. For her final
presentation, Sally will incorporate experimental
music and dance, along with literary and dramatic
theory, to create opportunities for chance and autonomy
within the choral group. Sally traveled to Greece
where she attended the Delphi Conference on Ancient
Drama and the first National Theater of Greece Summer
Academy. A theatre major, Sally works with Mark
Sussman of Parsons School of Design and Shawn Garrett
of Barnard's Theatre Department.
Lisa Perlson's project compares government
responses in France and Britain to high levels of
AIDS among African immigrants. She is particularly
interested in the way in which AIDS became central
to the debate over immigration policy in France
in the 1990s. While traveling in Paris, Provence,
and London over the summer, she interviewed representatives
of various AIDS organizations who work on both the
national and local level in African communities.
Lisa is a political science major and her mentor
is Linda Beck of the Barnard College Political Science
Department.
Ashley Reed is studying the public school
system in New Orleans. She began her project by
running econometric and statistical regressions
on the achievement test scores of each school, testing
variables such as student-teacher ratio, income
of the parents, and ethnicity in order to discover
what factors contribute to the test scores. She
plans to visit the schools that are doing well,
as well as those that are doing poorly, and interview
the principals to find out what these schools are
doing differently. The goal of her project is to
suggest some public policy measures to reform the
system. An economics major, Ashley studies with
Rajiv Sethi of Barnard's Economics Department.
After traveling to southern Spain and photographing
many examples of Moorish art, Kathryn Roberts
is exploring the link between art and mathematics.
She has analyzed the symmetry of geometric patterns
and considered them within the broader contexts
of history and religion. In doing so Kathryn attempts
to divine meaning from what is often seen as purely
decorative. A mathematics major, Kathryn works with
Henry Pinkham of Columbia University's Mathematics
Department.
Rachel Sussman's project examines the growth
of political expression in late eighteenth/early
nineteenth century Oxford. Drawing on her research
at Oxford, she hopes to demonstrate how the political
activity of those unrepresented during this period
shaped the electoral reforms of the mid-nineteenth
century. Rachel is a history major and her mentors
are Mark Whittow and William Whyte, both of Oxford
University.
Zuzanna Szadkowski examines and questions
her identity as a Polish American through performance.
She calls on the historical circumstances of her
birth, the texts and images central to her early
development, and the love of theatre that defines
her today in order to compose a comic piece to be
performed here at Barnard and in Warsaw, Poland.
A theatre major, Zuzanna studies with Denny Partridge
and Steve Friedman of the Barnard College Theatre
Department.
.jpg)
