Kristen Patterson, a 2002 Doris Duke Conservation Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is now in Madagascar doing cutting-edge environmental work—combined with cutting-edge work in population and health.

As the Population and Environment Program Officer for SantéNet (Health Net), Ms. Patterson works with Champion Commune, which encourages behavior changes that integrate improvements in health, environment, economic development, and governance. “I contribute towards the institutional development of three Malagasy NGOs that are implementing partners for the health and environment components of Champion Commune,” she said. She also is collaborating with regional officials and a Peace Corps volunteer to foster water, sanitation, and hygiene initiatives in the moist forest biological corridor near Fianarantsoa, where she lives.

Ms. Patterson’s work in Madagascar is supported by a two-year Population-Environment Fellowship from the University of Michigan, which promotes linked approaches to population, health, and environmental issues in the developing world.

It is the third time that Ms. Patterson has worked in Africa. She served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in a village in Niger after graduating from Colby College in Maine, where she returned after master’s degree studies to work for the International Livestock Research Institute.

At Colby, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology with a concentration in environmental science, Ms. Patterson spent a lot of time studying off-campus—far off-campus, in Anguilla, the Mojave Desert, and Palau, among other challenging locales. “I [also] spent summers in college working for the U.S. Forest Service, first in Utah and then California, searching for spotted owls,” Ms. Patterson said.

After her Peace Corps service, she earned an M.S. in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development, plus a certificate in African Studies, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The interdisciplinary CBSD program allowed her to meld her interests in conservation and international development.

Based on her experience, Ms. Patterson has this advice for those starting out in the field: “Don’t worry if you don’t fit into a specialized niche. My interests have always been interdisciplinary, and I used to long to be a specialist in some conservation-related field. Now, I have a job that requires me to work across different sectors, which suits me well.”

As to the next step in her career, she says, “I’d like to stay involved in interdisciplinary work, either abroad or in the U.S., perhaps with a U.S.-based foundation. I also remain interested in outdoor education opportunities for urban youth in the U.S.”

The Doris Duke Conservation Fellowship, she adds, gave her an important boost. “The Fellows’ gathering was invaluable. I imagine that being a Doris Duke Conservation Fellow helped me attain my current position, and I hope that it bears fruit in future job searches as well!”

Doris Duke Conservation Fellow Jocelyn Tutak, currently enrolled in the Conservation Science and Policy program at Duke University, has a longstanding interest in environmental conservation.

Ms. Tutak, who earned a B.S. in Natural Resource Management from Rutgers University in 2003, said, “I grew up in a very urban area—Kearny, New Jersey, right outside of New York City—and that industrial, urban landscape somehow really instilled in me a love of all things green and wild after seeing the impact humans could have on the environment. My parents are compassionate people who always taught me, through both words and actions, to leave a place better than I’d found it. I was also lucky to have an outstanding 8th-grade science teacher who taught his biology class from an environmental perspective. That really inspired me, and helped me to realize that this could be a career.”

In her program at Duke, Ms. Tutak particularly enjoys studying and using geographic information system (GIS) software and technology as a support tool for conservation planning.

She writes that she was drawn to the program at Duke “because it combined my strengths in science and research with a policy and community-based aspect—I thought that would be a practical combination in the real world of conservation.”

Even before beginning her master’s program, Ms. Tutak had already worked in the conservation field. She spent three summers doing restoration field work in New Jersey’s Hackensack Meadowlands—an area that is exceptionally degraded—monitoring vegetation as it colonized restored sites. She also spent a summer in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona working as a telemetry intern tracking the endangered Southwestern Willow Flycatcher.

In this position, she says, she learned an incredible amount about how conservation research takes place in the field. “I also saw here for the first time the intense level of conflict such a conservation effort can provoke in the surrounding community.”

Ms. Tutak, who expects to graduate from the Duke program in spring 2007, is thinking of pursuing a job at a nonprofit land conservation organization, particularly one that uses innovative conservation methods and involves local communities in developing conservation strategies.

The Doris Duke Conservation Fellowship, she says, “really gave me the ability to just call prospective employers and talk to them about internships and advice. I think without the confidence boost and summer funding, I would have been slightly more hesitant. Because of that I found an excellent summer internship with the Nature Conservancy of Washington.”

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was the “epiphany” for Steven Yaffee, who read it in middle school and has pursued an education and career in the environment ever since.

After an undergraduate education in aquatic and wildlife science at the University of Michigan, he earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Policy and Planning from MIT (1979).

“Having both science and policy in my background has been critical to my understanding of the issues and—I believe—my effectiveness as a teacher, scholar, and practitioner,” writes Yaffee, who is the faculty advisor for the Doris Duke Conservation Fellows Program (DDCF) at the University of Michigan.

With 30 years of experience in the environmental field, Yaffee says the biggest change from the early 1970s to today lies in the amount of influence by non-governmental organizations.

“When I started working on endangered species and land use issues in the 1970s, most of the environmental groups had ramshackle offices on Dupont Circle in D.C., and agency decisions were incredibly opaque,” Yaffee writes. “Today, environmental organizations are much more professional and strategic, and agency decisions are documented in impact statements and other documents and are able to be challenged on scientific and procedural grounds.”

As the Theodore Roosevelt Professor of Ecosystem Management at the University of Michigan, Yaffee utilizes role-playing and case studies to place students in the position of real-world decision makers facing difficult choices.

“People remember things they experience, and they remember stories and anecdotes more than anything else,” Yaffee says. “We’ve been programmed by thousands of years of cultural history to do so. Hence, providing students with simulated experiences and case studies, with written assignments that reinforce those experiences, tends to make the material ‘sticky.’”

Yaffee has been the director since 2000 of the Ecosystem Management Initiative at Michigan, which studies and supports community-based partnerships that utilize shared decision-making to resolve land-use issues.

“Many of these groups are like the Applegate Partnership in southern Oregon,” Yaffee states, “which has brought together agencies, community members, timber interests and environmentalists to work on natural resources issues. In doing so, they have transformed their communities from hostility and conflict to more productive relationships.”

As a longstanding participant in the Doris Duke Conservation Fellows Program, Yaffee notes that the program is equally transformative. “There’s no doubt that the program has hugely changed some of our Fellows’ lives. For example, Joe Short did his summer internship with the Northern Forest Center in New Hampshire, and then was offered a full time job. He also married Liz Hamilton, another Duke Fellow!” Yaffee writes that “Joe, Liz and the other Fellows are not just being transformed by the program; they themselves are causing real change on the ground.”

Twenty years before she began working with the Early College High School initiative, Roberta Matthews was already committed to school-college collaboration. During the 1980’s, Dr. Matthews worked with the American Social History Project to develop a team-teaching model that brought college faculty and high school teachers together to teach American history, literature, and writing to high school students. The model also reflected Dr. Matthews’ long involvement in the national learning community movement.

“The project was based on mutual respect and joint faculty development, and it had a lot of success,” she recalls. “What began as a local project with funding from a small local foundation expanded exponentially into a national project with funding from several national foundations.”

Dr. Matthews is currently provost at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, where she uses her experience in school-university partnerships on another initiative: the STAR [Science, Technology, And Research] Early College High School, located on the campus of Erasmus High School in New York City. Students attending STAR “are on the college campus from the beginning,” she says. “As freshmen, they cycle into activities in the library that are connected to research in social studies classes, and they also spend quality time in our science labs. During the second semester, they participate in hands-on and interactive noncredit workshops taught by college faculty, to introduce them to the excitement of scientific discovery.”

Summer courses are also offered to students. Some prepare students for high school, others for college courses. During one, the chairperson of the anthropology department conducted an archeological dig at Erasmus, one of the oldest high school sites in the country. “Now,” Dr. Matthews says, “we have students who are passionate about anthropology and archaeology.”

STAR offers underserved students an opportunity to earn college credit during high school. By graduation, many will have earned at least one year of credit, in disciplines like science and math that may be poorly supported in inner city districts.

STAR’s first class will graduate in spring 2007 and already, Dr. Matthews says, “college recruiters are camping out at STAR. Our students are being actively wooed by other colleges,” but some may be interested in Brooklyn’s competitive B.A./M.A. program, which guarantees 15 high-achieving students admission to the Downstate Medical College in Brooklyn. “We believe there will be several students who will qualify for this prestigious program,” she says.

STAR is part of the national early college high school program that aims to give students the background, experience, and credits to support their timely graduation from college. But Dr. Matthews says it has become clear that students have aspirations beyond college: “They want to be doctors, they want to be researchers, they want to be teachers and health professionals, they want to go to graduate school,” she explains.

“Early exposure to college facilities and classes has a tremendous impact on students,” she continues. “Brooklyn College has a beautiful new state-of-the-art library, for example, and to bring an urban public school student into such an environment and say ‘go for it—this could all be yours’ makes a tremendous difference in broadening the aspirations of young students.”

Donald Cronkite, a professor in the Biology Department of Hope College, received a phone call in 1990 from the director of the Leadership Program for Teachers at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, asking if he would be interested in directing the curriculum for the Foundation’s first LPT biology institute.

“At that time my sons were high school biology students, and there were some things I wasn’t fully happy with in their classes,” Dr. Cronkite remembers. “I thought if I went to this thing, I’d understand how high school teachers think.” After directing the institutes for six summers, he got even more insight than he had anticipated.

His curriculum structured the four-week institutes around labs, lectures, and discussions geared toward high school teachers. The philosophy, Dr. Cronkite says, “was that if you have good people, and you put them all together, wonderful things will result.”

The first biology institute, held in 1991 at Princeton University, was focused on humans and the environment. When participating teachers arrived on the first day of the institute, Dr. Cronkite handed them a meter stick with instructions to use it to gather data on humans and use simple statistics to present a report by the end of the week. Many of the teachers, he says, brought the simple exercise back to their own classes.

“I think they wanted to be rejuvenated to some extent, and to get to talk to professors for four weeks,” he says. “But it was important to me that they think of themselves as a community, so they would have the support of a community when they were teaching their courses.” Teachers who participated in the program even 15 years ago are still in touch and sharing ideas, he says, and look forward to seeing each other at meetings of the National Association of Biology Teachers.

The LPT institutes had staying power with Dr. Cronkite as well—they inspired him to continue working with school-college partnerships.

“As a result of working with those teachers, I noticed an interesting phenomenon,” he recalls. “Really good high school teachers have a disdain for college professors, and if you talk to professors, they say that if high school teachers were better, they’d have better college students.”

Dr. Cronkite took that idea and developed the Links Program, which from 1999 to 2002 brought biology teachers and professors together to “find out what we have in common and see what we can do to help
each other.”

The biology institutes also “caused me to change the way I taught,” he says. “I managed to get the big section (of Introductory Biology at Hope College) broken into three or four different sections, and I did more different things, taking into account people who learn differently. Now I do a bit of everything in class, and I learned all that from these high school teachers.”

After teaching social studies in the Cleveland school district for 36 years, Allan Keller, coordinator of the Cleveland Leadership Program for Teachers, can relate to the teachers who are participating in the program.

“The purpose of the program is to expand both content knowledge and pedagogical skills of Cleveland public school teachers,” he explains. “It’s a challenge because usually you get one or the other; but the challenge to be a good teacher is to work on both at the same time.”

The program, begun two years ago, currently has some 24 participating teachers mostly from the Cleveland public school district. Participants attend a two-week seminar at Kenyon College and Cleveland State University over the summer and then six workshops in Cleveland during the school year. School-university collaboration isn’t new to Kenyon or to Mr. Keller—since 1985, he and other Cleveland teachers have taught high school-level classes at the college through the Kenyon Academic Partnership.

The Cleveland program has so far been focused on 20th-century history. Participating teachers used primary and secondary historical sources, literature, film, poetry, and art to study World War I during the program’s first year, and to examine the 1920s and 1930s during the second year.

“One of the things teachers really enjoy is the challenge of the material,” Mr. Keller explains. “They have very enlightening discussions, sometimes led by teachers and sometimes led by professors. It’s enriching. The material is challenging the way they look at history,” he continues, adding that while history is usually taught from a political and military perspective, teachers in the Cleveland project are learning to look at history from a social and cultural angle as well.

During the second year, pedagogy specialist Daisy Martin of Stanford was invited to join the summer seminar and lead a workshop during the school year on how to get students “to learn to think historically.”

“The challenge,” Mr. Keller says, “is not only to create meaningful workshops, but also to translate that back into being used in the classroom.” During the program’s upcoming third year, teachers will formulate lesson plans based on the LPT seminars and become “teacher-leaders,” taking the lessons back to their schools to share with their colleagues.

The program has received positive feedback from participating teachers, and Mr. Keller says this success is due in part to the professors who are leading the program—Kenyon’s professor of American studies Peter Rutkoff and professor of history Will Scott.

“Their hearts are in the right place,” Mr. Keller explains. “They are committed to the program. They enjoy working with people, with teachers, with the summer sessions. The teachers love working with Will and Peter because they take a collegial approach—they model what we are trying to teach.”

Ellen Nerenberg (MM’05) is spending her year as a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellow studying cultural representations of crime in modern Italy—in particular, murder cases.

“I’m interested in those very things that we try to conceal because they don’t tell the story we want them to tell,” explains Dr. Nerenberg, a professor of Italian Studies at Wesleyan University. “With the advent of the European Union, what is and is not Italian is becoming quite important, as Italy is trying to maintain its own sovereign cultural activity. Italy has its storied legacy of art, but it also has the heinous crimes that Italian citizens commit. The ways new media and cinematic and literary worlds capitalize on these moments of unrest are visible in the court cases I am researching.”

Crime isn’t a new topic of research for Dr. Nerenberg. As a doctoral student in the University of Chicago’s Romance Languages and Literatures Department, she wrote her dissertation on the representations of prisons in Italian prose written between 1930 and 1960. The works she studied present barracks, convents, brothels, and even homes as prisons, implying, she concluded, “that while living under fascism was oppressive, it is not as though the Fall of the Regime saw changes in the way carceral space and spatial experience were representated.” From this dissertation she wrote Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism, which won the Howard R. Marraro Prize in 2002 from the Modern Language Association for the best manuscript in North America on an Italian topic.

An essay she wrote on monsters in the Italian literary imagination, centered around Pietro Pacciani, known as the Monster of Florence for committing eight double-homicides, supplied the idea for her current research. The book she proposed for the McIntosh Fellowship, Making A Killing, concerns three recent murder trials in Italy.

One of the cases, called the Case of Little Samuel, involves a young mother sentenced to 30 years in prison for the 2002 murder of her son. In this case, Dr. Nerenberg is looking at “the narrative that gets generated about her guilt or innocence” through newspaper, television, and literary culture. These different narrative genres mutually transform each other, and while the literary establishment would prefer to disregard true crime narratives as “low culture,” she says, “you find an interest in the criminal in all forms of contemporary Italian narrative.”

“It is noteworthy,” Dr. Nerenberg added, “that just at the moment when the Italian polity could have been considering the putative criminal activity of its own premier, Silvio Berlusconi, himself a television magnate, its attention was riveted to this horrible and fascinating case of infanticide, the television coverage of which was relentless. And, I believe, deliberate.”

Among the issues facing graduate education, Carolyn Dever cites “questions of interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity; diversity; training students for a shrinking and changing workplace, whether in academia or not in academia; and how we’re going to keep funding graduate education.”

“Graduate education has to evolve or die,” said Dr. Dever, a 1988 Mellon Fellow professor of English and women’s and gender studies and associate dean in the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. “We do need to think in those terms. We need to be responsive to the world out there, and reflect.”

Dr. Dever has been interested in the state of graduate education since she was a doctoral student at Harvard University in the early 1990s. As an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for Humanistic Studies, Dr. Dever researched feminist and queer theory and Victorian literature at Harvard, and then taught graduate classes at New York University, where she designed a Ph.D. program in English and served as director of graduate students. The experience, she says, “gave me a wonderful bird’s-eye view of graduate school and how it works in the lives of graduate students.

“The future of our field is in the hands of these students,” Dr. Dever says.

Teaching on the graduate level helped Dr. Dever “realize that I would not have been able to go to graduate school if not for the Mellon Fellowship. I wouldn’t be involved with administrative work if not for the Mellon Fellowship.”

“I wrote to Bob Weisbuch [then president of Woodrow Wilson],” Dr. Dever recalls. “I told him what I was doing now, and that I was really grateful for the Fellowship and the opportunity it offered, and that’s how we got talking about the Responsive Ph.D.”

As a professor of African-American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, Anastasia Curwood (MMUF Dissertation’02) researches and teaches twentieth-century African-American social, cultural, and intellectual history, including the history of the black family and African-American gender and sexuality.

The appeal of history, she says, is in “all these interesting stories and narratives, finding out how things became the way they were. It’s not inevitable, but very contingent. I like the fact that anything could have happened.”

Studying history as a doctoral student at Princeton University also gave her a chance to combine her academic interests with a personal story—her family’s history.

“While I was in college, my aunt gave me the love letters my grandparents wrote to each other in the 1930s,” Dr. Curwood says. “I realized that the tools for analysis I was learning in history could be used on the letters, to find out the historical context” of the place and time they lived.

It was the “performative aspect of the letters” that first interested her historically, she recalls. Her grandparents showed their ideal versions of themselves in the letters, “who they wanted to be” as opposed to who they really were. The marriage fell apart, with Dr. Curwood’s grandfather committing suicide and her grandmother going back to graduate school.

“I saw the tensions in their relationship and realized that they were trying to fulfill an ideal,” Dr. Curwood says. She used the letters in her dissertation to discuss how, during the New Negro movement of the 1920s and 1930s, African-American couples felt social pressure to have idealized marriages—matches based on both love and equality of class identity, ambitions, and outlook.

“At the time, African Americans were very racially self-conscious,” she explains. “They were taking a fresh outlook on race relations and becoming more militant, less fearful, more politically aware, and more cosmopolitan. This idea came from New York and Chicago, that African Americans were going to shape their own image and be politically and socially active.”

Dr. Curwood used two other case studies in her dissertation: the relationship between Harlem renaissance author Jean Toomer and his second wife, Marjorie Toomer, and Robert Flippin’s marriage to Katherine Stewart Flippin, a leading figure in the San Francisco school system. Considered together, Dr. Curwood says, the three relationships are “fascinating because the public and private spheres were so intertwined in such different ways.”

Currently, Dr. Curwood is working on a book from her dissertation, titled Stormy Weather: The New Negro Marriage and the Creation of a Modern Race.

Studying American civilization as a doctoral student at Brown University has given Stéphanie Larrieux (MMUF T&R ’05) “the flexibility to explore all my interests,” which range from history and Americana to film.

That flexibility also allowed her to choose an interdisciplinary topic for her dissertation, Racing the Future: Hollywood Science Fiction Film Narratives of Race.

“I look specifically at ‘city of the future’ films from the Civil Rights era to the present,” she explains, “using key films that demonstrate particular trends, tendencies, and representations of race in the U.S. over time and how that’s been changing.”

Ms. Larrieux, who studied film, anthropology, and French at Wesleyan University before enrolling at Brown, has long been interested not only in science fiction—her 8th-grade teacher named her “most likely to need space boots”—but also in analyzing culture.

“My family is from Haiti, so I learned American culture from the outside,” she explains. “I guess I’ve been doing this for a long time. My favorite films growing up were Star Wars and The Princess Bride, so I started pulling that thread, teasing it a bit.”

In 2005, with assistance from an MMUF Travel and Research Grant, Ms. Larrieux went to California to research in Hollywood’s film archives. She narrowed her list of 200 films down to just handful that trace American attitudes toward race over the past 30 years, including Alien Nations, Blade Runner, Omega Man, I, Robot, Demolition Man, and the Matrix trilogy.

“When I tell people about my topic, they inevitably respond, ‘So there are black people in science fiction?’” she laughs. “But for me, race doesn’t necessarily only mean black people. When I talk about racialization, people in the U.S. context are all raced in some way. I’m interested in how Hollywood deals with it.”

Although much has been written about race and film separately, few scholars have combined the two, and Ms. Larrieux “is trying to fuse these bodies of knowledge together. It’s exciting to make a fresh contribution,” she says, “but it’s a little daunting, too.”

While growing up in Jerusalem, and then as a student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Yaakov Ariel (CN’85) watched Christians evangelizing the inhabitants of the city, and promoting the idea of the Second Coming of Jesus to earth.

“I encountered groups even in my small neighborhood who were evangelizing,” he recalls. “I could not tell what they were teaching, and had no idea where they came from.”

Now a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, specializing in the relationship between Judaism and evangelical Christianity, Dr. Yaakov says his work is, “in some ways, the fulfillment of a dream to make sense of where the groups I had encountered in my childhood came from and why.”

Supported in part by the Newcombe Fellowship, Dr. Yaakov wrote his dissertation and book, On Behalf of Israel: American Fundamentalist Attitudes Toward the Jewish People and Zionism, from his research on these groups. He followed it with a second book, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880-2000, and is currently working on a third installment.

Millions of Christians, he explains, have come to Jerusalem over the past few decades to visit and live in the city. Members of Holiness, Pentecostal, Baptist, and other conservative evangelical Churches, he says, “tend to read the Bible more literally, to take seriously the prophetic passages in the New and Old Testaments, and consider the Holy Land and the Jewish people to be very important to the drama of Salvation.”

“In contrast to classical Christian claims to having inherited the Jews, these groups see Jews as the heirs to the biblical promises to the Children of Israel,” he explains. “On the one hand, they see the Jewish unwillingness to accept Jesus as a mistake, but at the same time they see the Jews as people with the potential to resume their role as God’s chosen people, and believe they can help the Jews resettle the land and prepare themselves for the return of Christ.”

These Christian Zionists have sought to help the Jews establish a commonwealth in the Land of Israel, as a preparation for “the arrival of the Lord and the establishment of the kingdom of the Lord on earth, with Jerusalem as its capital.”

“The relationship between the Jews and evangelical Christians is very complex and ambivalent,” Dr. Yaakov explains. “I found out that these interactions brought both sides to modify their attitudes and perceptions of each other—it creates a unique moment between the two communities of faiths.”

Dr. Yaakov’s research has also revealed how Israeli Judaism has copied aspects of American Judaism, including the movement of Jewish Renewal, Conservative and Reform Judaism, as well as the effect of the women’s movement on contemporary Jewish religious life.

It is a result, he says, of how “America invites people to create and celebrate their faith. I think religious freedom is part of the American story—in fact it’s the American story. America has built a legal, political system that encourages religious creativity, especially within the Christian realm; but as a result of that atmosphere, American Judaism is also creative.”

Renewed fears of terrorism, harsh exchanges over religion and war, ongoing concerns about climate change: It’s easy to imagine why, in late summer 2006, major media outlets would consider timely a new book titled Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit.

But, says author and 1991 Newcombe Fellow Joshua Foa Dienstag, he formulated his project—the subject of a July interview on BBC Radio 4, a New York Times editorial commentary in late August, his own op-ed in the L.A. Times in early September, and a subsequent talk show on U.S. radio’s syndicated On Point—“in the late nineties when the Dow was soaring toward ten thousand and the economy was humming along.”

What’s more, the UCLA political theorist is quick to point out, pessimism as a political philosophy has nothing to do with moods or the temper of the times. Rather, the book’s opening chapter characterizes pessimism as “an entire tradition of thought [that] has gone missing from our standard histories of political theory”—but one that “has been hiding in plain sight.”

“On several occasions,” Dr. Dienstag explains, “Nietzsche calls himself a pessimist, but few people have picked up on that, and I wondered why. As I did some research, I also realized there were a number of people who didn’t fit well in any of the obvious traditions of political theory—liberalism, Marxism, pragmatism, and so on—and wondered if there was something in common.”

Such thinkers as Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Freud, Camus, and Foucault, he soon realized, were also “suspicious of the idea that reason can deliver us to happiness, in the form of either science or philosophy or historical understanding. All of these things at various times have been sold to us as the key to human contentment; optimists promised that these disciplines, through reason, could solve our problems. Pessimists don’t think so.”

In an era when, as BBC Radio’s Laurie Taylor commented, “anyone who dares to suggest that notions of progress and advancement might be mere delusions is likely to be described in terms that suggest a character fault,” observers could well mistake pessimism for inaction or nihilism. Dr. Dienstag, who now considers himself a pessimist, argues to the contrary.

“Pessimism doesn’t have to lead to quietism or passivity or anything like that.  It does lead you to place certain limits on what you might imagine is possible,” he says. “In a way it’s actually empowering to liberate yourself from the burden of having to live out a certain kind of history that’s already pre-scripted. [This approach] leads to a focus on the present, on alleviating actually existing suffering rather than enabling structures to be built that would to lead to some fantastical future.

“And the next question would be, do I have children? Yes, I do!”

Pessimism, Dr. Dienstag adds, also requires recasting optimistic assumptions about needs, rights, and entitlements.  “We really have no idea what people will do with the freedom and opportunity we’re given, and we shouldn’t expect to have any idea of what they should do or want to do.  So we have to be careful about what we say people might need or want out of government or education or the economy or anything like that.  We can’t assume that every human being has the same trajectory and will travel in the same way. 

As an undergraduate music major at Penn State University, Sarah Eyerly (CN’05) discovered that her singing voice, soprano with a fast vibrato, was better suited to historical performance than to modern music.

“Italian music from the seventeenth century felt better to me than the typical nineteenth- and twentieth-century art song and operatic repertory,” she explains. She became interested in learning more about historical performance—a field of scholarship that reconstructs from archival records how music was meant to sound at the time it was written—and went on to earn a master’s degree in the discipline from the Mannes College of Music in New York.

Ms. Eyerly is now a doctoral student in musicology and criticism at the University of California, Davis. With support from a Newcombe Fellowship, she is writing her dissertation—Singing from the Heart: Memorization and Improvisation in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Communities of the Moravian Church—on historical performance practice.

“What I’ve found is that eighteenth-century Moravian congregants cultivated a style of improvisation that was only possible in a literate context through the use of a memorized library of compositional techniques as well as memorization from written sources,” Ms. Eyerly says. She has found “written sources that talk about how they practiced musical improvisation,” including transcriptions of improvised worship services, improvised songs, and manuals on how to improvise, as well as “hundreds of church documents, communal diaries, and descriptions by observers of improvised music.”

To gather these documents, Ms. Eyerly traveled to the town of Herrnhut, a corner of modern Germany bordering the Czech Republic and Poland. There, during the early 1700s, the Lutheran minister Count Zinzendorf offered sanctuary to refugees fleeing the reign of the Hapsburgs. The community he fostered on his estate became the Brüdergemeine, better known in America as the Moravian Church.

“People have speculated in the past on how Moravians accomplished improvisation, but no one has been able to recreate it because they hadn’t found the documents I’ve been able to find,” Ms. Eyerly explains. “The town and the archives are still there, and they’ve had an archivist since the mid-eighteenth century. I actually took out the entire card catalogue, drawer by drawer, looked at every card and found documents that hadn’t been looked at before.” Each day in Herrnhut, she photographed thousands of pages, and at night the mother of her German host family helped her translate the archaic German script.

From these documents, Ms. Eyerly has been able to understand that the Moravians improvised their music through “a very consciously learned process…every community member had to memorize thousands of pre-existing hymns, and then meditate on a spiritual concept or Bible verse to create a hymn-sermon. Community members would sing to each other when they greeted each other on the street,” she says. “Song was really integrated into their everyday life—their whole concept of society was based around song.”

Even while writing her dissertation, Ms. Eyerly is working on recreating Moravian improvisation with her own church choir, and hopes to conduct a historically accurate performance of a Moravian worship service in 2006.

As an undergraduate at Yale in the mid-1990s, Sarah Jacoby studied abroad for a semester in India, Nepal, and Tibet. While doing fieldwork for a research project in a rural area in the Kathmandu Valley, she studied with one of the most famous old-school (Nyingma) Tibetan Buddhist teachers living today and his family.

Years later, as a doctoral student in religious studies at the University of Virginia, she discovered that this teacher possessed a manuscript which scholars of Tibetan Buddhism had been trying to get hold of for years—the autobiography of Dewai Dorje, also known as Sera Khandro (“the dakini [female wisdom being] of Sera”).

Born in 1891, Sera Khandro is one of the few known female treasure revealers in Tibetan Buddhism. The tradition of treasure revelation recalls the story of how Buddhism was first brought to Tibet in the 8th century by the Indian master Padmasambhava. Padmasambhava and his consort, Yeshe Tsogyal, were said to have hidden scriptures across Tibet that were meant to be discovered and interpreted over time by treasure revealers and their consorts.

Because treasure revealers are usually men who have female consorts, the story of Sera Khandro, as a female treasure revealer with a male consort, has the potential to change how scholars look at the tradition of treasure revelation, and how Tibetan Buddhism interprets gender and sexuality.

“Because of this divine couple metaphor,” Ms. Jacoby says, “the situation of Sera Khandro is a reversal of what you would see with a male revealer, in that Sera Khandro describes needing male consorts in order to reveal treasure. You can read her work as a love story, because she’s writing this really beautiful love story about her consort. I think that here, love becomes a metaphor for enlightenment.”

Ms. Jacoby approached the owner of the manuscript, who, now at 95 years old, had himself been one of the disciples of Sera Khandro.

“I asked to be able to read it, and I commented that it’s such an amazing text,” she recalls. “He asked me why I wanted to publish it, and I responded that I felt it would be of benefit to the English-speaking world to have access to this text.” He gave Ms. Jacoby a photocopy of the handwritten manuscript, which she has translated and is now using as the basis for her dissertation. She describes her discovery of the text as “just sort of serendipitous.”

Ms. Jacoby has been approached by editors interested in publishing both her translation of the autobiography and her dissertation, which she is currently writing with help from a Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

“When I think about having a Newcombe, I’m just happy to have this opportunity to devote time to what I really care about—my project and my writing,” she says.

Although he successfully entered the field of business journalism after graduating from Morehouse College, Terrence Johnson felt something was missing from his life and career.

“I wanted to pursue something different,” he recalls, “and I always had an interest in religion.” He made the move to Boston to earn a master’s of divinity degree from Harvard University, with a plan to combine his interests in religion and journalism.

But his experiences while at Harvard changed his interests and direction. He pursued ordination as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, joined a silent prayer group, and worked at a hospital intern—an experience that “opened up a different world for me.”

One morning at the hospital, he met a young man who had just come out of a car accident a quadriplegic. The meeting inspired Mr. Johnson to begin working with other young accident victims: “I’d have these academic moments at Harvard, and then go out and meet people trying to piece together their lives after horrific accidents—those are moments I’ll never forget.”

Today Mr. Johnson is a graduate student in the Religious Studies Department of Brown University. With support from a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, he is spending 2005-06 at Princeton University, working with associate professor of religion Eddie Glaude, Jr.

“I’m interested in working on how we deal with religion in a radically changing world,” he says, describing his current research on race, religion, and democracy. “How can a diverse society engage each other, given our radical differences in religion? How do we mend this divide between religion and politics, and how do we talk about basic issues around individual needs and wants without denying religion?”

Alongside his doctoral studies, Mr. Johnson has tackled some of these issues directly over the past three summers by working with the Pre-college Leadership Program at Morehouse College. The program fosters discussion among 30 upper-level, African-American high school men, about half of whom enter Morehouse in the following year.

“We try to show how you remain committed to your community and also to the world,” Mr. Johnson explains. “How do you promote diversity and pluralism, and how do you build the beloved community?”

After he receives the Ph.D., Mr. Johnson plans to pursue a tenure-track teaching position. But at the same time, he hopes to “keep my feet in both the academy and the public world. I’m hoping my academic life can help me make scholarly contributions, but I hope I don’t have to divide between the scholarly world and the broader world.”

One hundred percent of students who graduate from University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts, go to college, and in the nine years that the school has been operating, only three students have dropped out. According to UPCS principal June Eressy, these numbers are particularly impressive considering that many of the students who attend
the school would be unlikely to graduate from high school, were they left in a large traditional comprehensive high school.

“The high expectations of the school” make UPCS different from the surrounding public school system, according to Mrs. Eressy. What she calls the school’s “culture of achievement” is fostered by UPCS’ relationship with nearby Clark University, supported by the Nellie Mae Partnerships for College Success program.

Students from the surrounding urban neighborhood are chosen to attend UPCS by lottery, and 44 enter the school’s seventh-grade class each year. They arrive at the school with varied levels of literacy, and so their first two to three years at UPCS are spent in a full-immersion reading, writing, and speaking program designed by Mrs. Eressy.

Throughout their six years at UPCS, students are mentored and tutored by volunteer and work-study students from Clark, who interact with them at school and on the Clark campus. UPCS students have access to Clark’s library and other facilities, and during their junior and senior years can take elective classes at the college.

“A lot of times,” Mrs. Eressy says, “our students are more conscientious and successful than the Clark students. They consider it a privilege to take classes at the university.”

Because students at UPCS take their upper-level elective courses at Clark, the school has a chance to focus its resources on the literacy program and core courses, resources that would otherwise have to be spent on offering a range of electives at the high school. The resulting model—a small school with an intense focus on achievement in a few core disciplines—has won acclaim from educators. In 2005 UPCS was named the highest-performing urban high school in Massachusetts by Newsweek magazine.

UPCS hosts professional development institutes during the summer for educators who want to replicate the UPCS model at their own schools. Mrs. Eressy says UPCS is always evolving, and notes that “the beauty of being a small school is that we can personalize to meet student needs.”

But for now, she says, “I’m just so happy to be able to make a difference for these kids. We’re working on making them more successful in college, and that’s why we’re involved in Partnerships for College Success. We want to figure out ways to make them as successful in college as they are here.”

After spending a year in Damascus, Syria—her second as a Foreign Service officer—Ana Escrogima says the best part about her job is “people-people relations.”

“That’s my job, that’s what I’m here for,” she explains. “To teach people about Americans. The most fulfilling thing, as a woman of color, as a Latina, is to show people in Syria that diplomats come from all backgrounds and colors. People question whether I’m American, and I get to say that there are a lot of people like me. That’s the best part about being here and doing what I’m doing.”

Ms. Escrogima was awarded a Thomas Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship during her sophomore year at Brown University, where she studied international relations. The Fellowship funded her master’s degree in international affairs at Columbia University and then ushered her into the Foreign Service.

“When I was in the summer of my sophomore year, I was looking for scholarships for people interested in traveling,” she says. “It never occurred to me that I would join the Foreign Service…but it fit into my area of interest in international affairs. When you’ve signed a contract at 18 for the next 8 years of your life, only as you progress along do you really understand what you’re doing.

Now, she says, “I’m 25, I have a master’s degree, I have an amazing job. I’m doing exactly what interests/motivates me…all in a pretty short time to do all this. For having made the decision so long ago, if I had to do it all over again, I would make the same choice.”

Ms. Escrogima says she was first drawn to the Foreign Service by issues close to home—her parents, who immigrated from the Dominican Republic to the lower east side of Manhattan. Ms. Escrogima studied immigration abroad in Paris as an undergraduate and wrote a thesis from interviews with North Africans resident in France. The experience, she says, helped her “realize that issues like that are universal.”

“I think the Europeans face a whole other series of issues, but it is the same [as in America] as well: How do you create a national identity out of this diverse group of people?” Ms. Escrogima asks. “These issues are everywhere…that’s why crosscultural study is important. The USA is not the only one with these issues, and we have a lot to share in how to integrate immigrants.”

In her current rotation in Damascus, Ms. Escrogima has covered the war in Iraq, regional women’s issues, and other topics, and has developed contacts for the American embassy. She describes her work as “kind of like grad school all over again, but with less time to produce your papers.

“We write cables that inform people about what’s going on, you have local contacts. You present it and analyze it and give Washington a better look at what’s going on in the country.”

Syria, she says, “is really a front-runner. There’s not a lot of information on Syria out there, so it’s very interesting.”

“People (in the Middle East) are so hospitable, so friendly,” she says. “They love American people, but are very clear about not liking (American) foreign policy in the region. It puts you in a position where you have to explain and defend your (position) on foreign policy. I try to focus on the positives, on what people like about America.”

Ms. Escrogima, who has traveled to Jordan, Dubai, and Turkey and studied Arabic in Tunisia, hopes to land her next post in Egypt, a country that is less stable than the authoritarian state of Syria, but where she will get “a totally different experience.”

“The Foreign Service is interesting because you get to try different jobs and countries,” she says. “I think the Pickering program is wonderful. I’m very proud that the program has become so mainstream, financially and morally supported by the higher-level people at the State Department. I hope it continues.”