Hopkins scholars win Fulbright - Three students, one lecturer awarded

Three seniors and one Writing Seminars lecturer were awarded Fulbright scholarships shortly before commencement last May.

Niall Keleher, Suman Sureshbabu, Mahnu Davar and Anthony Pirnot were among the 1125 U.S. students offered grants to study and research abroad. Those students enrolled in the esteemed Fulbright U.S. Student Program for 2003 will travel to over 140 different countries beginning this fall.

Sponsored by the State Department's Educational and Cultural Affairs Dept., the prestigious Fulbright scholarship allows students, professionals and artists the opportunity to engage in fully subsidized international exchange.

The goal of the program, established in 1946 by Senator J. William Fulbright, is to enrich American scholars with a cross-cultural exchange of ideas and customs. Students design their own program based on individual experiences, research or academic interests.

Niall Keleher, who graduated in the spring, will travel to Ecuador where he will study the shrimping industry as a case study in economic structural management.

Drawing on his experiences in Guatemala, South Africa, Tunisia and SAIS's Bologna Center in Italy, Keleher will be looking, in particular, at the instability of the shrimping sector and its affect on Ecuador's economy.

Keleher, who also went to Ecuador last summer, was a Woodrow Wilson Research Fellow and an Economics and International Studies major.

Suman Surushbabu, who received a B.A. in Political Science last May, plans to travel to Ghana next week to launch a project focused on women's role in regional development. Surushbabu's research idea spawned from a project completed in 2002, where she analyzed the lives of rural women in Ghana.

"My project is basically a combination of my past two summers at Hopkins," Surushbabu said. After receiving the Provost Undergraduate Research Award, Surushbabu went to India and Ghana, where she discovered that women in the region had ideas for development that were going largely unheard.

"The question is, "how do you get [the government] to be more representative of what the people want?'" said Surushbabu. "This is really important because in the end, no matter how much NGO's do, it's up to the governing body to decide."

As Surushbabu sees it, the most crucial part of development is how decisions are made at the local level, and how much--or how little--the women are directly involved.

Fellow classmate Mahnu Davar, a Philosophy major, is going to India to design a series of children's books based on Hindu folktales. Davar will also be enrolled in classes at Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, a Theology and Sanskrit Language school.

Having already published a similar book in the U.S., Davar will use his skills as a cartoonist and artist to take on the much larger project in India. While at Hopkins, Davar contributed political cartoons to the News-Letter and was the managing editor of The Subcontinental, a journal of South Asian American political identity.

Visiting lecturer Anthony Pirnot was also awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, adding to his extensive resume of international study. Pirnot, who was teaching at Hopkins under the Elliot Coleman Fellowship for teaching and writing, also served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Poland and subsequently taught English at the Jagiellonian University.

While in Poland this fall, Pirnot plans to do research for a novel on the influence of English and British writing on Polish literature.

The Fulbright scholars will have their traveling, school and living expenses fully paid for one year while they conduct research.