Senior Serena S. Stein Awarded Beinecke Scholarship

Each year 100 colleges and universities are invited to nominate one student for a Beinecke Scholarship, and 21 new scholarships were awarded in 2009. Students plan to enter a master's or doctoral program in the arts, humanities or social sciences, and have demonstrated intellectual ability, scholastic achievement and personal promise during his or her undergraduate career. 

Serena S. Stein is Penn's 2009 recipient of the Beinecke Scholarship. She will graduate in December 2009 with a BA in Anthropology and Comparative Literature. A Benjamin Franklin Scholar and University Scholar, Serena conducted ethnographic research in a Toba indigenous community in Formosa, Argentina in 2007. In 2008, she travelled to the Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala with the Guatemala Health Initiative to research questions of distress and medicalization among Tzutujil Maya survivors of the Hurricane Stan mudslide in 2005. Serena is the former chair of the Undergraduate Anthropology Society and Editor-in-Chief of the In Situ Undergraduate Journal of Anthropology that will be published online this semester. She has also been Chair of the Conservative Jewish Community at Penn Hillel and an active member of the Philomathean Society, PennQuest, and Casa Hispanica.