Jessica Bernstein, Autumn Cohen, Zane Reister and Suzanne Robinson are Union finalists for the Thomas J. Watson Traveling Fellowship. They will advance to competition with about 200 finalists from 49 other liberal arts colleges. Sixty winners will receive
stipends of $16,000 for a year of travel outside North America.
This year, 23 Union seniors applied for the Watson. Winners are expected to be announced in March. Union has had 40 Watson Fellows since 1969, the year the program began.
Bernstein, a philosophy major, has planned to study Tae Kwon Do in South Korea, England
and Norway to explore the extent to which the ancient male-dominated discipline has
included women. Cohen, a women's studies major, would like to travel to the Netherlands,
England and South Africa to examine the role of the midwife in women's childbearing
experience. Reister, a political science major, plans to use photography, interviews and
historical research to examine the architectural similarities between Renaissance and
Baroque churches built between 1550 and 1750 and Beaux-Arts train stations built between
1880 and 1990 in Italy, France and the U.K. Robinson, a civil engineering major, would
like to examine island ecosystems in the Indian Ocean, South Pacific, Eastern Caribbean
and North Atlantic to see how island cultures have adapted technologies to the
environment.
Members of Union's selection committee are Ann Anderson, mechanical engineering; J.
Douglass Klein, economics (committee chair); Amanda Leamon, French; Steve Leavitt,
anthropology; and Seyfollah Maleki, physics