Six Whitman Students Receive Prestigious Fulbright Scholarships
WALLA WALLA, Wash. -- Six Whitman College students are among 1,134 graduating seniors across the nation who have received prestigious Fulbright scholarships to spend the next academic year conducting academic research in foreign countries. Five of the six Whitman recipients will also teach English while conducting independent research projects.
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| Something in common: Whitman seniors who have received Fulbright Scholarships for the 2003-04 academic year are (l-r) Hilary Dorsch, Jack Davey, Richard Detheridge, Todd Blodgett and Jaime Oberlander. Not present for the photo was Fulbright recipient Martin Beyl, a sixth member of the graduating class. |
A total of 15 Whitman students have received Fulbright grants in the past three years, according to Robert Tobin, Whitman professor of German and chair of the Fulbright evaluation committee on campus.
Established by Congress in 1946, the Fulbright Student Program is considered the flagship of America's educational exchange programs. Its goal is to foster mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries.
Hilary Dorsch, who is majoring in history and German at Whitman, is one of nearly 1,000 students who have received research fellowships. This portion of the Fulbright Student Program attracted about 4,800 applicants this year.
Dorsch, who is from Aberdeen, Wash., will study musicology in Berlin, Germany. She plans to focus on the ways music was used to construct a national identity in Germany from the 1870s through 1945.
Whitman's remaining five Fulbright recipients are among 170 students who have received teaching assistantships.
Todd Blodgett, a Whitman politics major from Roy, Wash., received a teaching assistantship in Austria, where he will also pursue studies in international relations, focusing on European security issues.
Martin Beyl, a German studies major from Vancouver, Wash., will serve his teaching assistantship in Germany, where he was born to a German father and American mother. Beyl plans a career in education.
Three Whitman students -- Jack Davey (Veradale, Wash.), Richard Detheridge (Puyallup, Wash.), and Jaime Oberlander (Tumwater, Wash.) -- will serve their teaching assistantships in South Korea.
While teaching in South Korea, Oberlander, a sociology major, plans to study the ways in which the public school system helps to shape each generation's sense of morality.
Detheridge, a biology major, will concentrate his studies on the development of sports and athletics in South Korea from the time of the 1988 Seoul Olympics through the 2002 World Cup soccer championships. Detheridge is the son of a Korean mother and American father.
Davey, an anthropology major, plans to study prehistoric archaeology and state formation on the Korean peninsula.
More information about the study plans of Whitman's Fulbright recipients follows:
During the Wilhelmine era (1870s-1914), Dorsch notes, disparate regions were first uniting into a German nation and attempting to construct a cohesive notion of what it meant to be German. "Those attempting to establish such an identity for themselves or for others, who ranged from villagers in the Pfalz region to magazine editors, used German music as a mechanism for joining people from across Germany under a notion of greater German identity," Dorsch says.
Proponents of the Heimat (homeland) movement sought to formulate German identity by emphasizing traditional cultural roots, Dorsch says. German folk music and national hymns were enthusiastically embraced, while composer-theorists such as Richard Wagner (1813-83) explored the ideas of the German Volk (people) and Vaterland (fatherland).
Wagner, as Dorsch notes, was instrumental in the rise of German nationalism through his essays such as "Judaism in Music" and musical compositions. "I plan to study (Wagner's) influence, as well as that of other writers, thinkers and composers at the turn of the century and during the Nazi era," she says. Her studies will include the role of the German government and propagandists in directing the currents of popular thought. She also plans to examine the ways in which ordinary German citizens contributed to the rise of musical German nationalism.
Last summer, Dorsch spent five weeks in Germany and Switzerland, working with Professor Tobin on research into a German feminist movement. That research trip was financed through Whitman's Perry Research Grant program, which encourages faculty- student research.
Under the auspices of its Common Security and Defense Policy, EU leaders have pledged to establish a Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) capable of peacekeeping, humanitarian and rescue operations. Scheduled for readiness by 2003, the RRF will have 60,000 troops, 400 aircraft and 200 ships. Whether that readiness goal will be met is doubtful, says Blodgett. Critical issues also remain unresolved in such areas as a definitive geographic scope and range of activities, funding deficiencies for modern military hardware and systems, and the political obstacles inherent in forging a common military policy among 15 member states.
Blodgett spent one semester of study (January-May 2002) in Vienna, taking classes sponsored by the Institute for European Studies. Last summer, he worked in Washington, D.C. as a national security intern for the Battelle Corp., which contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and Energy. He was responsible for tracking and analyzing all legislation pertaining to the Department of Homeland Security.
Oberlander, who studied in Kyoto, Japan, during her junior year, is basing her senior sociology thesis on a comparison of the ways in which schools in the U.S. and Japan "act as a socializing agent in instilling within students a sense of national and/or cultural identity. . .South Korea serves as the ideal venue for me to pursue a deeper concept of moral education and the role it plays in shaping the next generation of society."
Oberlander plans to examine a number of issues, including Japanese and American influences on the Korean school system, and the ways in which the co-existence of Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism contributes to the education system's moral framework.
Archaeologists in different countries in the region view evidence in different and revealing ways, Davey says. "While in Korea I hope to further acquaint myself with these vastly different viewpoints as well as visit the many archaeological sites in the country. When my time in Korea is over I hope to have a thorough understanding of not just the prehistory of the peninsula, but of the modern discipline of Korean archaeology as well."
A native of Great Britain who came to the United States in 1989, Davey returned to Britain during the summers of his freshman and sophomore years at Whitman to work on archaeological excavations. As a junior, he spent his spring semester studying at the University of York's renowned archaeology department. He traveled to Jordan during the summer after his junior year to do archaeological research with Gary Rollefson, a Whitman professor of anthropology.
Detheridge's studies will include visits to the Korean National Olympic Headquarters in Seoul as well as some of the stadia and venues used in both the Olympics and World Cup. He visited a number of Olympic sites in Europe last summer, while spending two months conducting research on bees and flower interactions for his senior biology thesis. Financed by the Whitman Summer Science Rall Fund, his research was done in conjunction with Whitman associate biology professor Heidi Dobson. The rearch work was based at the University of Vienna and Sweden's Oland Ecological Research Station.
Detheridge lived with his parents in Korea from 1985 to 1987 while his father was stationed with the U.S. Army. He also lived with his parents in Hanau, Germany, from 1989 to 1993 while his father was stationed there. While at Whitman, he has worked as a student athletic trainer and been an active member of the Asian Cultural Awareness Club. He also hosted a show, called the "Sizzling Wok," on the campus radio station.
Over time, he says, "I lost touch with German culture and my language abilities gradually decreased; I could no longer effectively communicate." His interest in Germany, however, came back to life at Whitman, where he is majoring in German studies. Beyl spent his junior year in Berlin, taking classes through the Institute of European Studies and at the Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin. He lived in Prenzlaur Berg, an artistically inclined community, formerly a part of communist East Berlin.
Veronica, Beyl's landlady, talked about what it was like living in East Germany. There were stories of "daring escape attempts" and "government oppression of the individual," he says. Those accounts, however, were balanced by stories of "food, of healthcare and public transportation that everyone could afford, of products that didn't fall into pieces upon use, of communities that fell with the wall in Berlin. Her account blended the bitter anger of repression with nostalgia; before, I had seen criticism without counterargument; but now, the preconceived notions I had unwittingly harbored began to unravel."
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