Students, Professors Win Significant Awards
April 14, 2014
The Rosen Fellows
Daniel Freedman, winner of a Fulbright fellowship.
Chris Martin, winner of a Fulbright fellowship.
The 2013–2014 academic year has brought in many awards of distinction for the students and faculty members of Brooklyn College.
Eleven Brooklyn College students will have a chance to make their visions of a number of impactful projects a reality through Rosen Fellowships—which give stipends up to $5,000 that allow students to have an out-of-classroom experience. While some fellows will be completing projects in the United States, many will be traveling overseas: Shoshana Adler, will be traveling to France to do an ethnography of the French poet Charles Peguy; Christopher Cohron, is headed first to Montana to study fossils and then to Berlin to present his findings; Tiffany Collings and Hadasa Levilev will be starting a granola bar business; Joshua Hoffman will be studying the history of the Cambodian genocide; Deukyun Hwang will be filming a documentary in South Korea on the country's new marriage laws; Jone Naujokaityte will be traveling to Alabama to lead a paleontological dig; Maryam Razaz, a Macaulay Honors student at Brooklyn College, will be in Nepal to studying Ayurvedic medicine; Ashley Schwartz will be interning at the Center For Public Integrity in Washington, DC; Colleen Scriven will be filming a web series based on "Much Ado About Nothing"; Kadeem Swenson will be interning at MTV China; and Aakaash Varma will be traveling to India and Pakistan to do an oral history of the 1947 partitioning.
The Rosens were not alone in their honors this year: Brooklyn College can count among its students four Fulbright fellows, a Jeanette K. Watson fellow, and nearly two dozen students who presented papers at this year's National Conference on Undergraduate Research, the most competitive undergraduate research conference in the country among other prestigious honors.
Fulbright winners Daniel Freedman, a student in the M.F.A. program in poetry, is traveling to Austria to work on a poetry manuscript; Chris Martin, a student in the M.A. in Education program, is going to Indonesia to teach English; John Horgan, who is working on his master's degree in education, will be teaching English in Malaysia; and William Cheung, a CUNY Baccalaureate student, is headed to Germany, also to teach English.
Freshman Kaitlin Cockerham has been awarded a Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship. The fellowship provides internships, mentoring, and enriched educational opportunities to promising New York City undergraduates with the goal of increasing their life choices.
Three student producers from the Television and Radio program's Summer Broadcast News Institute have been nominated for a national student Emmy award. Nickeisha Johnson, Michael Gomez, and Anthony Tart will attend the 35th Annual Television Academy Foundation College Television Awards in Los Angeles later this month.
Senior Iskander Kapkayev was recently named a Math For America Fellow, an award that will grant him full tuition for a master’s degree in teaching, and up to $100,000 in stipends, among other perks.
Brooklyn College faculty members have also been stacking up honors.
Most recently, Marjorie Welish, a distinguished lecturer in the English department, won a Guggenheim fellowship. The high-profile fellowships are for mid-career professionals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. Welish teaches in the master of fine arts program in poetry and is the author of several books.
Professor Jean Theoharis won the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, the first scholarly book on the civil rights icon’s activism outside of the bus incident in Montgomery, Ala.
Professor Peter Lipke has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Mircrobiology, a highly prestigious distinction that recognizes original contributions to the field, and puts him in the company of Nobel Prize winners and National Medal of Science awardees. Lipke has conducted groundbreaking work on amyloid proteins and fungi that are harmful to humans, especially those affected by HIV and other immunosuppressive disorders.
Virginia Sánchez Korrol, a professor emeritus of the department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, was honored with the Comité November’s First Annual Women’s History Month Celebration & Puerto Rican Women Legacy Award. Sánchez Korrol’s work on Latino women, families, and ethnicity in New York City continues to enrich our ever-growing understanding and knowledge of Latino history.
Associate Professor of Art Jennifer Ball was awarded the 2014–2015 Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for her book project, Habit Forming: Representations of Byzantine Monastics 9th–15th Centuries.
Celina Su, an associate professor in the political science department, is headed to Washington to participate in an Obama administration initiative to create a more open government. Su is just one of roughly a dozen researchers who have been invited to take part in the project.
