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Summary of Projects: Class of 2002

Larissa Babij went to Prague in pursuit of a theatre architecture project and for some adventure. She found herself in an abandoned baroque church a kilometer from the Polish border with a group of Czech artists. While learning to speak Czech and exploring ways of overcoming communication barriers, Larissa fine-tuned her story-telling skills. For her project, she shared stories with an audience of "travellers" in May. Larissa graduated magna cum laude. After graduation, she plans to work for a New York architecture firm before going to graduate school.

Katie Curran spent the summer of 2001 as an intern in the Play Services Department of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London. Her mentor for the project was Professor Quandra Prettyman of the Barnard English Department. She is currently writing a book to share with others the stories and words of patients who have inspired her, and her presentation, "A Season at Great Ormond Street:Words and Images from Within a London Children's Hospital," included pictures of some of these special people, in addition to excerpts from her writings. Katie was awarded the Frank Gilbert Bryson Prize, the Alpha Zeta Club Scholarship, the American Institute of Chemists Prize, the Ida and John Kauderer Prize to a premedical chemistry major, the Barbara Ann Liskin Memorial Prize to a pre-medical student committed to women’s issues and patient care, and the Bear Pin for leadership and service. She also graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. In August, Katie will begin her first year of medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Although she knows that her studies will mold her path, she hopes to pursue a career in pediatric oncology.

Dana Fields researched her family history, concentrating mainly on the cities from which her family emigrated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the patterns that made up their migrations within Europe and to America. With the help of her mentor, Professor Cathy Nepomnashchy, of the Barnard Slavic Department and the Harriman Institute, she then traveled to these cities, which are scattered across Poland, Lithuania, Russian, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic, recording images and impressions. She presented her photography from the trip in an exhibition entitled "Echolocation: an exploration of family, identity, experience, and history" at the Harriman Institute on March 6. In addition, she is working on a collection of essays which will also incorporate her photographs, focusing on the trip and on the issues surrounding researching and physically retracing her family history. Dana was a Classics major, graduated summa cum laude, and received the Columbia University Benjamin F. Romaine Prize for proficiency in Greek language and literature. She will begin graduate studies in Classics at Princeton this fall.

Irina Feygina spent a year living in India, Nepal, and Tibet, studying Tibetan culture, history, language, religion, and philosophy. She began in Dharamsala, India, a center of Tibetan cultural and political life in exile. She then spent a month inTibet, traveling around villages and cities, getting to know the people, trying to understand the cultural and social implications of the current state of occupation of Tibet by China. Later, she worked as a teacher in the Denjong Pedma Academy, a Buddhist orphanage in Sikkim, India, teaching kids from six to sixteen years old. She also lived in Katmandu, studying with a wonderful Tibetan teacher, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, as well as taking other Buddhist classes and trying to learn some classical Tibetan. She focused on Tibetan philosophy, which in many ways is the foundation of the social and religious experiences, which are intimately interlocked. The journey was tied to her attempts at understanding her identity, and coming to terms with the struggle between sincerity and necessity, between origin and the present, between memory and immediate construction. She conveyed these ideas in her presentation, supplementing them with a series of photographs, which allowed the viewers to share a bit of her journey. The visual component of her presentation can be viewed on her website: www.columbia.edu/~if36/tibet.html. Irina graduated magna cum laude, was awarded the C. V. Starr Scholarship for 1999, 2000, 2002, the D. C. Wallerstein Scholarship, the Lowe Grant for work in contemporary art, and the CJC Grant for the Arts. She is currently working as a simultaneous translator for a Russian theatre director.

Katie Graves-Abe's project, "JAILED: An After-School Perspective on Day School Education in New York City" looked at literacy-based after-school programs for elementary students in New York. In trying to understand the great success of these after-school programs, the study also examined how and why day schools are failing many students in New York. She worked with Professor Susan Sacks of the Barnard Education Department. Katie graduated summa cum laude and was awarded the Associate Alumnae of Barnard College Graduate Fellowship. Over the summer, Katie will be working for Homes for the Homeless. In the fall, she will attend the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Miriam Haskell interviewed former Marxist-Leninist political detainees in Morocco. Most of the detainees were imprisoned during the early 1970s for their political activities and released in the 1980s. She used her interviews and onsite research to write an analysis of the evolution and future of the Moroccan left. She worked with Professor Richard Bulliet of Columbia University’s History Department. Miriam will be interning at the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children this summer in New York. She hopes to go into international journalism.

Yedida Kanfer studied the role of women in Russian labor movements around 1900. For her project, she spent a semester in Moscow working in the archive of the tsarist secret police. She focused especially upon the leader of a police-sponsored labor party, Mariya Vil'bushevich, and closely studied correspondence and other documents related to the movement. Yedida majored in History and she worked with Professors Michael Stanislawski, Richard Wortman, and Andrew Plaa. She plans to continue her study of women's labor history in graduate school. Yedida graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded the Eugene H. Byrne History Prize. She has been awarded a Fulbright grant to travel to Russia to pursue research for a project with the working title, "The Writings of Russian Radical Women: Patterns in Memory."

Eleanor King travelled to areas in Japan that are highly charged in Japanese cultural imagination, yet held as rural, marginal, and "vanishing." Returning to Japan for the third time in her life, Eleanor wondered about the possibility of remembrance and renewal, and containment (or attainment) and desire coinciding. For her project, Eleanor presented her photographs and read letters and journal entries to explore the way memory and imagination can collapse the boundaries between absence, distance, past, and presence, proximity, and present. A comparative literature major, Eleanor incorporated the research she did on Mount Dread in Japan into her senior essay on the unsettling effects of contemporary memorial practices in the U.S. (spontaneous memorials) and Japan (mizuko kuyo). She graduated magna cum laude and she worked with Professor D. Max Moerman of the Barnard Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department. Next year, Eleanor will be entering Union Theological Seminary to pursue her Master of Divinity.

Catherine Martin's Centennial Scholar Project, Managing Mao's Money, examined China's accession to the World Trade Organization and how China's banking system will be affected. After traveling to China in the summer of 2000, Catherine holed up in the library to write her paper, then presented it in a public lecture during April of 2002. Her mentor was Professor Xiaobo Lu of the Barnard Political Science Department. After graduation,she will be working at International Corporate Consultants in New York, managing financial affairs for foreign clients.

Lisa Perlson's project compared government responses in France and Britain to high levels of AIDS among African immigrants. She was 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 was a political science and chemistry major and her mentor was Linda Beck of the Political Science Department. Lisa presented her project at the African Studies Association conference in Texas in November 2001. She was awarded the American Institute of Chemists Prize, the Grace Potter Rice Fellowship, and graduated summa cum laude. Lisa will begin a graduate program in Chemistry at Standford this Fall.

Yana Pikman worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Fisher. The laboratory studies the precise molecular mechanisms that regulate cell cycle progression. She has been investigating the role of Csk1, a protein involved in controlling cell cycle progression in fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, in DNA damage response. Her presentation "Stop and Fix, Inspect and Resume" provided an introductory look into how cells survive DNA damage. Yana graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. She will begin Medical School at Harvard University in Fall 2002.

Annie Tucker spent eight months in Indonesia studying the indigenous dance of Malang, East Java. She worked with Pak Soleh Adi Pramono and Karen Elizabet at the Mangun Dharma Arts center in Tumpang and Mbak Suparmi Susanto at the University of Malang. She learned dances for men and women, welcoming dancesand masked dances, supplementing this practice with academic classes in Javanese performing arts history. Once back at Barnard, Annie taught Indonesian dance classes to other students in preparation for a performance, Javanese Dreams, which in addition to repertory in full costume featured readings of adapted folk tales that explained the genesis of some of the dances. She graduatd magna cum laude in February, and has since been teaching modern dance classes at the Tappan Zee Dance Group in Tarrytown, as well as working on her own choreography. Most recently, she performed Slow/Slice/Kwik/Krush, a solo based on the Indonesian martial arts movements of Pencaksilat. In June she will return to Indonesia for a year, working at the Bali Purnati Center for the Arts and apprenticing with Rhoda Grauer, a filmmaker whose recent work includes "Dancing" for WNET, an 11-part series about cross-cultural experiences of dance, and a film about the bissu priests of Sulawesi.