Four Kenyon graduates win Fulbright Fellowships
Four members of Kenyon's Class of 2003 will take up Fulbright Fellowships for the 2003-04 academic year. Kristina Cushing, Sharon Lipovsky, Sarah McGavran, and Natalie Roote have been honored by the Fulbright Program, established at the end of World War II to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries. Grants are made for university teaching, advanced research, graduate study, and teaching in elementary and secondary schools.
Cushing, a native of Holliston, Massachusetts, will be spending her Fulbright year in Austria working as a language assistant is a secondary school. A history and German double major, she has been studying German language and culture since her first year at Kenyon.
Lipovsky, whose family currently lives in Metairie, Louisiana, will be teaching in a German school. She majored in English and German, beginning her study of German as a first-year student. Lipovsky spent her junior year in Berlin, Germany.
Like Lipovsky, McGavran will be assigned to a school somewhere in Germany. An art-history major, she has been studying German since she was in high school. McGavran hopes to be assigned to a large city so that she can pursue her interest in contemporary German art and modern German history.
Roote is Kenyon's only winner of a Fulbright Research Fellowship this year. An art-history major with a concentration in Asian studies, she developed an interest in digital imaging and video art in a class taught by Professor of Art Claudia Esslinger. Roote began studying Chinese language and culture that same year and attended a summer program in Beiging, China, for intensive language study.
Studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Roote plans to focus on the work of video artists Song Dong and Qui Zhijie, with whom she has communicated with the help of Associate Professor of Chinese Jianhua Bai and teaching assistant Haiyan Cui. Roote is interested in establishing a forum to discuss Chinese video art in the United States when she returns.
One of the nation's leading liberal arts and sciences colleges and home to The Kenyon Review, Kenyon College offers 1,550 students a challenging educational experience enriched by a culture of friendship. Graduates of the college have included actor and philanthropist Paul Newman and Pulitzer-prize winning author E. L. Doctorow.