2015 Carleton-Funded Fellowship Recipients

Each year Carleton-funded fellowships make it possible for a number of students to engage in independent research, explore their passions, or embark on an adventure. All of these opportunities are made possible by the generosity of Carleton alumni, parents and friends of the college; they are completed over a summer or during Carleton’s winter break.  The following is a summary of the 2015 recipients:

Chang-Lan Fellowship

• Sawyer Middeleer ’16 will do archival research in the city of Hangzhou, focusing on cartography and the logic of urban and rural planning, with the goal of connecting state-building initiatives to the broader concept of space in China and how it has changed over time.

Class of 1963 Fellowships

• Sophie Buchmueller ’16 will investigate the potential of public art as a form of community building and as a catalyst for urban revitalization by examining public art projects in Detroit, Chicago, and Houston in which an individual artist uses art and architecture to spur community interest and urban revitalization in poor, marginalized neighborhoods.  The projects transform houses in rundown neighborhoods to encourage a rethinking of space and an increased neighborhood valuation and local commitment.
• Robbie Emmet ’16 will travel to the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle to conduct research on developing a probability density function (PDF) for the likelihood of discarding a given fraction of a fish catch with particular properties, which will then be tested in Stock Synthesis (SS), a stock assessment tool, and compared to various results.
• Hart Hornor ’16 will study genetics among queer families in Seattle and Portland by using a variety of anthropological research methods to narrow his focus, paying close attention to children conceived in the 1990s and having recently come of age, to examine the ways children in queer families understand kinship in relation to the dominant definition of kinship as biology.
• Maddie Lewis ’16 will research the the political ecology of gray wolf management in northern Wyoming through ethnographic research to examine diverging perspectives from ranchers, game officials, and legislators involved in managing expanding wolf populations, as well as how these competing stakeholders fit into and are considered in conservation frameworks.
• Veronica Garcia ’16 plans to shoot a documentary in Chicago and Mexico on her father’s transition into the United States, and how it affected his identity, focusing on his multiple identities (age, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, political party, body size, education etc.) and how he relates to these multiple identities while in different spaces.

David C. Donelson ’77 Fund

• Vivian Do ’16 and Isabelle Ibibo ’16 plan to travel to Japan to examine the stories behind ramen noodles and the relationship between ramen and Japanese culture.  They will also attend a four-day course at the Buddha Belly culinary school in Tokyo to learn how to handcraft noodles and make broth from scratch.
• Connor Rohwer ’17 will harness his passion for the culinary arts to explore the cultures of refugee communities in Minnesota.  Focusing primarily on Hmong, Somali, Ethiopian, and Tibetan communities in Minnesota, he will meet with chefs, farmers, and families to cook and sample their foods and listen to their food stories.

Four Friends Fellowship

• Sarah Abdel-Jelil ’16, Gabriela Olvera ’16, and Khuaten Maaneb de Macedo ’16 will travel to New Orleans to explore music as a mode of community healing through observation of performances and dialogue with musicians, as well as members of audiences and the community to get a sense of the role of music in their lives.

Professor Roy Grow Fellowship

• Jackson Bahn ’16 will travel to Myanmar to study the effects that internal and regional labor migration has on the economy, politics and society of villages there using extensive surveying in four villages and two settlement sites.
• Ruiqi Geng ’16 will hold a 6-week long “Peace through Art” workshop in Little Swan Elementary School for marginalized migrant children in suburban Beijing, where she will teach migrant children between 10 and 17 years-old Drama, Music, Visual Arts, and Dance with the help of public high school volunteers, and will hold weekly meetings called “Friends of Migrant Children” to educate the community on important issues in their life.
• Takeshi Hidaka ’16 will facilitate discussions at a student-run international conference in Japan, where he will push delegates to voice their opinions on issues important to the U.S.-Japan relationship in order to foster intercultural understanding, and will also reexamine his identity through revisiting his home country as a leader of the American delegation.
• Michelle Marinello ’16 will conduct an independent study in the field of Probability Theory and its applications to investment and economics, conducted under the supervision of advisers at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan.
• Peter Sang ’17 will study the social insurance built into the fabric of communities that helps mitigate the cost of disasters in rural Myanmar, where no insurance services exist to mitigate existential risks from unpredictable shocks to the farmers’ lives such crop failures or fire breakouts.

Dale and Elizabeth Hanson Fellowship in Ethics

• Caleb Rakestraw-Morn ’17 will conduct research at the Nietzsche Documentation Centre in Naumburg, Germany to study the works, correspondence and notebooks of Nietzsche to investigate the reasons why and the methods by which he writes with “reverse esotericism” and burying his intended meaning under his explicitly stated radicalism.
• Kyle Schiller ’17 will travel in Japan to study the phenomena known as Karoshi (death from overwork) and Karojisatsu (suicide from overwork) which claim thousands of lives each year by taking a holistic approach to recognizes the complex social dynamics underlying the ethics of suicide.
• Emily Tilton ’17 will conduct research to determine which factors, if any, doctors consider when determining the competency of patients with different religious beliefs. She will review literature that explores the relationship between religion and competency and by interviewing doctors to discover how they would act in hypothetical situations and how they have responded in real situations.
• Lindsey Walters ’16 will examine the historic entanglement of elite institutions of higher education in the Northeast with American slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. She will focus on Harvard and Brown Universities and their recent commissions to investigate and confront their complicity in and profit from slavery, in order to investigate the ethics involved in Harvard and Brown’s attempts at retrospective justice.

Independent Research Fellowships

• Elizabeth Davis ‘16 plans to travel to Greece and Turkey to work on two archaeological projects. In Greece, she will work on Professor Alex Knodell’s Mazi Archaeological Project before joining students and faculty from St. Olaf College on an excavation in coastal Turkey.
• Sally Donovan ’16 will study the effects of wetlands on denitrification rates within agriculturally dominated stream systems to explore the potential for wetlands to mitigate the effects of agricultural runoff and more broadly investigate solutions for restoring the Gulf of Mexico dead zone.
• Celeste Koppe ’16 will travel to Morocco to research the archives of the newspaper, Al- Alam, to better understand how leaders of the Moroccan resistance used certain identities to create the most effective resistance culture. She will also interview Moroccan citizens on how they identify as individuals and as a country to help draw connections between past and present ideas, and recognize how the Istiqlal party and national movement contributed to the current Moroccan national identity.
• Nate Livingston ’16 will investigate the biochemical mechanism by which the enzyme alanyl tRNA-synthetase ensures that the genetic code is accurately deciphered in protein synthesis, which is a joint project with Professor Joe Chihade at Carleton and Professor Christopher Francklyn at the University of Vermont.
• Evan Rothman ’16 will visit the New York City archives to examine the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville public schools decentralization conflict and the subsequent New York City-wide teachers’ strikes, considering its impact on the Jewish identity politics of the United Federation of Teachers. He will mine documents to question the historical and contemporary tensions in American Jewish identity.

Kelley International Fellowships

• Gretchen Fernholz ’16 will, as a continuation of her and Almeda Moree-Sanders ’16’s translation of “Where Are You?,” Russian author Lidia Golovkova’s book about cremation in the Soviet Union, visit and photograph sites in Russia and interview the book’s author. Using this information, they will create a website using materials and experiences gathered in Russia to be used as an educational resource.

Larson International Fellowships

• Gisell Calderon ’16 will travel across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway and create a personal essay film, cross-culturally examining trains as emblems of interconnectedness and global modernity. She hopes to see how much the cities surrounding the tracks are shaped and influenced by the longest railway in the world.
• Christopher Griffin ’17 will work as an apprentice at a male bespoke shoemaking shop in Paris, France to learn the trade through hands-on training and individual research, which he will document by creating a film entitled “Les pieds nus dans la cordonnerie.”
• Stu Lourey ’17 will return to Guatemala and use existing relationships to better understand the perspectives of indigenous ex-soldiers.  Through ethnographic research culminating in a professional-grade paper, he will produce a qualitative “ethnography of the particular’ that complicates the dichotomy between victim and aggressor and adds a voice to the larger discourse.
• Almeda Moree-Sanders ’16 will, as a continuation of her and Gretchen Fernholz ’16’s translation of “Where Are You?,” Russian author Lidia Golovkova’s book about cremation in the Soviet Union, visit and photograph sites in Russia and interview the book’s author. Using this information, they will create a website using materials and experiences gathered in Russia to be used as an educational resource.
• Victoria Rachmaninoff ’16 will study a female operated “neighborhood economy” system in a fishing community of Northern Coastal Peru to see how social relations among women in artisanal fishing communities impact household financial decisions and perceived notions of success in women’s businesses.

Allen and Irene Salisbury Fellowship

• Il Shan Ng ’17 will volunteer at three family-run organic farms in Japan, through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), to improve his Japanese, immerse in Japanese culture, and to learn about small organic agriculture.

Richard Salisbury Fellowship

• Roberto Nieves ’16 will explore Puerto Rican artists’ representations of national/ personal identity and see how those compare with the actual feelings of people on the island, to visit sites that may have shaped the national identity, and to see museums in different areas (from metropolitan San Juan to rural Lares) as to get a broader perspective on the topic.

The Yueh-Townsend Asian Fellowship Fund

• Kyle Schiller ’17 will serve as a member of the Japan-American Student Conference exploring Japan through structured programs intended to build interpersonal relationships between Japanese and American college students, after which he will seek a direct immersion through working on an organic farm