Four Barnard Students Receive Prestigious Fulbright Grants, Two Alumnae Receive Fellowships

New York, NY, May 22, 2002 – Thus far this year, four graduating seniors, Yedida Kanfer, Caroline Kim, Cecily Morrison, and Lisa Patrick are Fulbright grant winners. In addition, two recent alumnae, Elta Smith and Rihan Yeh, have won prestigious fellowships. According to Senior Class Dean Aaron Schneider, this has been "an outstanding year for the Fulbright competition, and we are very proud of our winners and, indeed, of all of our applicants."

Two Barnard alumnae have received fellowships:

Elta Smith, ’01, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which she will use to study public policy at MIT. Elta graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Environmental Science and Policy.

Rihan Yeh, ’00, was awarded a Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies. Rihan graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Music. She will study cultural anthropology.

Four graduating seniors have received Fulbright grants:

Yedida Kanfer, a history major from Bexley, Ohio, who will graduate summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with honors in history, is also a Centennial Scholar. She has been awarded the 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."

Caroline Kim, an American Studies major from Honolulu, Hawaii, has been awarded a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship to teach English in Korea.

Cecily Morrison, summa cum laude and a major in dance and ethnomusicology from Boston, Massachusetts, was awarded a Fulbright grant. Cecily plans to go to the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Budapest, Hungary, for an ethnomusicological study of bagpipes. In July she will continue her studies in the villages of Hungary. Morrison’s mother, Dr. Jean M. Borgatti, an associate professor of art history at Clark University, also received a Fulbright Teaching grant to Nigeria, where she will revisit sites that she studied in the late 1970s in terms of social change, arts, and culture.

Lisa Patrick, a major in environmental science from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was awarded a grant for a study of amphibian decline in Costa Rica. Her studies will begin in August and last for 10 months.

Contact: Petra Tuomi, Office of Public Affairs, (212) 854-7907, (212) 854-2037
Alyssa Sheinmel, Cindy Pulver, Office of Public Affairs, (212) 854-2037