Radcliffe Chooses ’03-’04 Scholars

Fifty-six scholars studying topics from immigration to love poetry will pursue their projects as fellows at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Institute officials announced last week.

The scholars, 46 women and 10 men, include 13 scientists, 8 artists and writers, 16 humanities scholars and 19 social scientists.

Each year, the Radcliffe Institute chooses a class of scholars, who come to Radcliffe for a year to pursue a specific project related to their field of study. This year, the program received 738 applicants for 56 spots.

Radcliffe provides these scholars with a stipend of up to $50,000, office space, research support and library privileges at Harvard, according to a spokesperson for the Institute.

Though each scholar pursues a project in his or her field of expertise, they are also grouped into academic “clusters”—related fields of study—for optimal collaboration.

“The notion is to have a variety of fellows working on all different projects, but also to have focused and sustained interaction and planned interaction,” said Radcliffe Dean Drew Gilpin Faust. “Many other institutes for advanced study do the same thing, they have special little areas.”

Last year, Radcliffe housed an astrophysics cluster.

This year, a group of computer scientists will study the concept of randomization and a group of social scientists will study immigration.

The latter cluster has met throughout the past year to help plan what issues they will tackle during their year at Radcliffe.

“I’m delighted,” said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard and a new Radcliffe fellow, who will work with the immigration cluster. “I was involved...in identifying the people we wanted to have in the cluster. We’ve already been meeting and talking about our projects.”

Hochschild’s project concerns identity politics and “the general relationship between race and ethnicity,” as the concepts have evolved over time.

Similarly, the computer scientists said they are excited about the new possibilities for collaboration that working at Radcliffe will mean for them.

“First of all, historically, a lot of the fellows in the cluster have already interacted in the past and written some papers together,” said new fellow Eli Ben-Sasson, who is a post-doctoral student with a joint post at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s what we’re hoping for, to be able to be in one place and work together a lot.”

Their project will look into the role of randomization in computer science.

“At a very high level, it turns out, somewhat surprisingly, many aspects of computer science suddenly become much richer and more interesting when randomization is thrown into the picture,” said Salil Vadhan, a fellow who is also an assistant professor of computer science at Harvard. “There are some areas of computer science that can’t even get off the ground without looking at randomization; cryptography is an example. But it’s an open question whether randomization is really necessary [in other areas.]”

In a different vein altogether, San Diego State University Professor of Poetry Marilyn Chin said she is looking forward to using the resources of Harvard’s Yenching Library as she works “trying to meld the two different types of love poems and...bridging East and West and developing a comprehensive aesthetic.”

She said she also writes love poetry as a way of dealing with a modern, war-saturated world.

“I decided to write love poems as an oblique way of dealing with the 20th century crisis,” Chin said. “Everybody’s writing war poems. I think we’re forgetting how to feel and I think poetry is the genre that’s really closest to our hearts and I think I want to use it to tell a different story from the war story.”

Harvard Research Fellow in Neurology Anne Brunet said she will continue her studies of a mechanism that many scientists now believe plays an essential role in the process of aging.

“There is new, exciting and recent evidence that in fact organismal longevity can be regulated and can be defined by genetic components,” said Brunet. “So the question becomes, which are the genes that affect organismal longevity?”

Studies have shown that replacements in simple genes can cause dramatic changes in longevity, she said, citing a study in which genetically altered worms lived three times longer than the average worm, she said.

Brunet said that in the long run, studies like hers could lead to tremendous gains in quality of life for older people.

Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard’s School of Design Laura J. Miller will study “the construction of domesticity, or the domestic scene,” framed by her study of Frances Glessner Lee, a woman raised in aristocracy who left behind her upbringing to pursue a career in forensic science.

She constructed dioramas of crime scenes, which Miller likened to “demented doll houses,” which focused on women as victims in primarily domestic spaces. The dioramas and the famous house in which Glessner Lee grew up present “utopian and dystopian designs,” Miller said. She plans to compare the differing takes on domesticity found in the house and in the dioramas.

And Assistant Professor of History Caroline M. Elkins’ project will focus on the sunset of the British Empire in Kenya in the 1950s, which she has studied for several years. She will spend the year at Radcliffe compiling her research and writing a book.

“I think [Radcliffe’s] now one of the more pre-eminent places to spend a year,” Elkins said. “I couldn’t be more thrilled to have been selected.”

The scholars are a mix of young and veteran scholars, which Faust said is a desirable combination for the Institute.

“We try very much to have scholars at all stages represented,” Faust said. “I think the more experienced scholars gain a great deal from the less experienced scholars and vice versa, and I really see that operating on a daily basis.”

She said she is looking forward to the scholars’ arrival at Radcliffe this fall.

“It’s fun because we go through this enormous process of application,” said Faust, “and through all of this, these names start to become familiar and it’s a wonderful day when they start to become people and even more wonderful when those people are here.”

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.