Foregoing the typical senior experience, senior fellows Aaron Colston '14, Miriam Kilimo '14 and Rena Sapon-White '14 will spend the year pursuing yearlong projects in historical poetry, interethnic friendship and Jewish identity.
The fellowship was established by former College President Ernest Hopkins in 1929, reportedly to afford Nelson Rockefeller '30 the opportunity to travel and collect fine art during his last year as a student. The program has since evolved, now providing fellows with funding and academic support for year-long projects.
Kilimo, who has wanted to pursue a senior fellowship since her freshman year, is studying interethnic friendships among people aged 18 to 25 who live in urban centers of her native Kenya, specifically at the causes for the survival or breaking down of friendships during ethnic tension or violence.
The fellowship is a meaningful project for Kilimo, who has personally experienced her research topic. Kilimo's best friend since childhood is of a different ethnic group, which has had a contentious history with Kilimo's.
"I remember my professor in my writing class asked me, What question keeps you up all night?'" Kilimo said. "I tried to make sure that those questions are the focus of my undergraduate education."
Kilimo began her research this summer, conducting interviews in Kenya. She is now transcribing them on campus and will determine the direction of the project from there, under the guidance of anthropology professor Sergei Kan, African and African-American studies professor Ayo Coly and government professor Jeremy Horowitz.
"For me it's a journey," she said. "When you go and talk to people it shapes your ideas in different ways. I don't know what the end result will be."
Colston is composing a series of poems telling the story of Mother Elizabeth Lange, the co-founder of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first successful order of nuns of African descent in the United States. His project will narrate the story of the Sisters and Mother Lange in the 19th century.
"I'm taking historical sources and making art from that," Colston said.
Colston decided to apply for the senior fellowship when he realized that writing an English honors thesis may limit the scope of his research.
"The opportunity of this fellowship is a challenge to produce basically an even bigger thesis," he said.
Colston spent part of the summer in Baltimore conducting research and composing preliminary drafts of poems and essays. This term, he will continue his research with English professor Cynthia Huntington and history professor Robert Bonner.
Sapon-White is in the second term of her fellowship, creating a documentary about the current state of Jewish identity in Poland, a country with "cultural wounds," she said.
Her research began last December, when she traveled to Poland to interview Jews with a grant from the Leslie Center for Humanities. After returning to campus to edit her footage, however, she realized that she wanted to expand her project.
"It's a universally inspiring story, but a big story." she said. "I realized that if I created a documentary from what I had then it would not do justice to this really important issue."
Sapon-White spent this summer conducting more interviews in Poland, and spent the fall shooting footage. Her documentary will feature a collection of stories about Jewish identity.
"The senior fellowship offered me the opportunity to put to work the ideas I've learned over the past few years and execute them in the way I want to do after I graduate," she said. "I am excited to see the finished product."
Fellows submit project proposals to a committee during the spring of their junior year and are not required to enroll in courses during their senior year or complete a major, although they may enroll or audit relevant courses to supplement their research or fulfill distributive requirements. The committee approves projects on a case-by-case basis.
"It's looking at each project and each student individually," undergraduate advising and research director Margaret Funnell said.
