Seniors Win Gardner Fellowships

While many seniors will leave Harvard this June to begin new careers outside of Cambridge, two of their classmates will be traveling a bit farther.

Helen Newman '99 and Adam R. Rzepka '99, the recipients of the George Peabody Gardner Traveling Fellowships, will spend next year traveling to Australia and India, respectively.

The fellowship, awarded by the Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) department to concentrators in VES, English, Philosophy, or Anthropology, is intended to "provide stipends for a year's travel during which, it is hoped, recipients will reflect on their undergraduate life in the context of a wider horizon."

Rzepka, a joint English and Philosophy concentrator, said he plans to travel to the town of Dharamsala in Northern India to talk to people about Tibetan literature and Tibetan media.

"I want to find out how a society becomes based on text and on media or defined through those things," Rzepka said.

He said his interest in the subject began in the fall of 1996 during a trip to the Himalayas when he observed "how people...maintain an identity through literature."

Newman is a VES concentrator interested in permaculture, the art of living on the land.

She will travel to homesteads in Australia and look at American urban enclaves.

"I've been inside for so long," she said. "I just want to be in the fresh air. So much of what we touch every day is synthetic. Farming is about touching things that are alive everyday."

Newman said the $13,500 prize will help her accomplish goals she had already set for herself.

"I wasn't planning on getting a real job anyway," she said. "But this makes it easier to do things I would have done anyway."

Rzepka expressed enthusiasm for the upcoming year.

"I'm glad to have the freedom to pursue this kind of research," he said. "I'm glad that someone thinks it's worthwhile enough to fund it."