Seven Ford Fellowships Are Awarded

Seven Harvard graduate students and post-doctorates join 93 other students and scholars from across the nation as recipients of Ford Foundation grants which will support their research projects.

Depending on their graduate level, students received more than $14,000 a year--in some cases including a combination of tuition assistance--travel reimbursements for an annual Foundation conference, and research support.

The 17-year old Ford program provides grants to U.S. citizens who are Puerto Rican, Mexican-American, Native American, Alaskan natives, Pacific Islanders or African American.

Diana I. Williams '95, a graduate student and new Ford Fellow in the History of American Civilization, said a core class she took as an undergraduate at Harvard inspired her to pursue research.

After taking Literature and Arts A-58: "Ethnicity, Modernity and Modernism in 20th Century Literature, Art and Culture" with Cabot Professor of English Literature Werner Sollors during her senior year, the history concentrator discovered an interest in cultural studies and headed toward graduate school.

Sollors, who is also Professor of Afro-American Studies, is her graduate advisor.

Like Williams, several of Harvard's Fellows plan to do their graduate work in fields involving ethnic or cultural studies.

New Ford Fellow Irene Monroe, a Divinity School doctoral student in the Religion, Gender and Culture program, said she will spend her academic career writing and teaching "African American queer history, the construction of African American sexuality and the relationship between anti-Semitism in Black Christian and Black Muslim theologies."

Monroe, a graduate of both Wellesley College and New York's Union Theological Seminary, served as a pastor at an African American church in New Jersey before coming to Harvard. During her college years, she worked as a youth minister at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Harvard Square.

Her choice of a major at Wellesley--African American Studies--came after an author told her "we needed to also have African American scholars writing about the black experience," Monroe said.

Like Monroe, Renee M. Ned found her academic calling--biology--in high school. The MIT graduate, now working for a Ph.D. in Biological and Biomedical Sciences, said she plans to research infectious diseases.

But the New Orleans native said she wishes Cambridge were more climatically similar to her hometown.

"I've only tolerated Boston winters because this is where MIT and Harvard are," she said.