Five Middlebury College Seniors Awarded Fulbright

Fellowships — An Unprecedented Five Out of Seven

Nominees from Middlebury Receive the Award

An unprecedented five out of seven Middlebury College

students nominated by the College for the J. William Fulbright

Fellowship have received the award. Five seniors—Julie Crosby

of Livermore, Colo.; David Grass of Jericho, Vt.; Erich Osterberg

of Newton, Mass.; Ashley Palmer of Southampton, Mass.; and Kate

Stone of Bethesda, Md.—have been awarded 1999 fellowships.

The Fulbright Program, which is funded by the United

States Information Agency, awards roughly 1,000 academic grants

each year to graduating seniors and graduate students to fund

a year of research abroad. This year marks the first time that

such a high percentage of Middlebury applicants have received

Fulbright grants.

Fulbright fellows are normally affiliated with a

university in the country in which they will be studying. The

program provides fellows with airfare, tuition, and a stipend

for housing, food, and other expenses.

Middlebury’s applicants for the Fulbright Program

are evaluated and advised by Director of Off-Campus Study David

Macey and the Study Abroad Committee. Four to eight Middlebury

students usually apply each year and, in past years, anywhere

from 30 to 50 percent of those graduates have received grants.

“The Fulbright Program is the culmination of

one’s intellectual and academic life and the launching pad for

the rest of his or her intellectual and academic life,” said

Macey.

Julie Crosby spent her junior year in Zimbabwe and

Ghana and plans to return to Ghana for her fellowship. As a sociology/anthropology

major with an English minor, she will unite her two fields of

study through her research of Ghanaian literature from a social

perspective.

She plans to audit courses at the University of Cape

Coast, where she studied last year, and travel around southern

Ghana, living in homestays. She will research literacy issues,

explore the influence of oral literature on written literature,

and examine more informal forms of pamphlet literature, which

are available to people who can’t afford to buy novels, and are

roughly equivalent to American comic books. The ultimate goal

of her research is to develop a curriculum for teaching Ghanaian

literature from a social perspective.

“I’m interested in cross-cultural representation,”

Crosby said. “If Americans can understand Ghanaian literature

in the context of where it comes from, then that can help to address

some of the gross misrepresentations of African countries that

are found in the news media and in Western literature.”

David Grass, an environmental studies and chemistry

joint major, will return to Chile, where he spent last spring

studying rain forest vegetation. His project will focus on lichens

as biological indicators of atmospheric pollution—a connection

he learned of while studying in Chile last spring. As his project,

he said, “I hope to develop a low-tech, easy, and cheap means

of detecting the air pollution that greatly affects the crops

in the rural agricultural areas of Chile. Currently farmers there

have no equipment for this purpose.”

“People’s burden to endure exposure to someone

else’s pollution gives them the right to know its effects,”

Grass added.

He will be doing field work outside Santiago, where

he will also take classes at the University of Chile.

Erich Osterberg, a geology major, will return to

New Zealand, where he spent last fall, to research underwater

chimneys and canyons on the continental shelf off the eastern

coast.

He learned of the existence of the underwater chimneys

and canyons while taking classes at the University of Otago in

Dunedin, New Zealand. The formations exist nowhere else in the

world, and have not been extensively researched. Osterberg, who

studied marine geology and oceanography at Middlebury, saw a great

research opportunity. “It was a really interesting project

that was waiting to be done,” he said.

In addition to taking classes at the University of

Otago, Osterberg will do field research, which will eventually

be applied toward a master’s degree in marine geology at the university.

Ashley Palmer, an East Asian studies major, will

spend 12 months in Japan, where she lived for two years with her

family as a child and also spent her junior year in high school

on an exchange program. Her fellowship will allow her to study

the community solidarity of rural Japanese health care, as well

as how residents of a village or members of a group work together

to take care of each other—an aspect of Japanese collective traditional

culture.

Palmer will take classes at a Japanese university.

She also plans to study one community in depth to examine the

ways in which the modern health care system in Japan complements

or conflicts with traditional ideas of health care.

“Countries look at each other’s health care

systems to find ways to improve delivery, utilization, and access

to health care,” she said. “However, I think it is important

to keep in mind the intricacies of any particular society or tradition.”

Kate Stone, an international studies major with concentrations

in Japanese and history, spent her junior year abroad in Japan,

and will return there for her fellowship. She proposes to study

the situation of Japanese children on the homefront during World

War II, many of whom were evacuated for their own protection.

Stone’s research will take the form of an oral history

project and she plans to interview survivors of the war as well

as look at records and diaries. She will also take classes at

a Japanese university. When her research is finished, she hopes

her findings will be published as an article.

“I had an amazing experience last year in Japan,”

Stone said. “I think a piece of my heart is somewhere in

Japan.”