Front Row in the Global Classroom

For the third time in four years, a graduating Sarah Lawrence student received a Watson Fellowship to spend a year traveling and learning about a subject of personal interest. Ryan Takemiya’s ’05 plans to assess the impact of hip-hop culture on Asia will take him to Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea in 2005-06. A dancer since high school, Takemiya says, “Asia is half the world, yet so little is known about its popular culture. I want to find out if they’re taking hip-hop to heart.”

Jeannine Pitas ’05 received a Fulbright grant to work in Uruguay with collegestudents who intend to become English teachers. She will also be translating poetry during a stay that will include time in the capital, Montevideo, as well as an outlying town. A literature, writing and philosophy student at Sarah Lawrence, she spent her junior year on the Sarah Lawrence in Oxford Program, as well as a summer studying in Poland. Since 1996 there have been nine Fulbright scholars from Sarah Lawrence.

Brian Emery ’07 and Lucy Goldstein ’06 were accepted into the prestigious Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts, in Prague, whose alumnae/i include film director Milos Forman. At Sarah Lawrence, the two have studied screenwriting, 16-mm and experimental filmmaking, and directing.

Russell Fellowships were awarded to Carre Adams ’07, I’Nasah Crockett ’08 and Katanya Magrey ’06, who will collaborate on a film examining race relations and diversity at Stellenbosch University, which is east of Cape Town, South Africa; and to William Rhodes ’07 and Samuel Stein ’05, who will conduct field research in Yunnan province, in rural southwestern China, working with local residents as part of a larger project assessing area environmental policies.