Three SAS Doctoral Students Awarded Spencer Dissertation Fellowships
June 2006
Leah Gordon, Azra Hromadzic and Elizabeth Vaquera, all doctoral students at the School of Arts and Sciences, have been awarded prestigious Spencer Dissertation Fellowships. These distinguished and highly competitive awards are given to 30 students nationally each year by the Spencer Foundation, whose purpose is to investigate ways in which education can be improved worldwide. The fellowship is awarded to individuals whose dissertations demonstrate potential for improving formal or informal education throughout the world by bringing new perspectives to history, theory or practice. In addition to the award, the Foundation also sponsors two meetings for the fellows to meet during their one-year fellowship tenure. "It's an opportunity to get feedback about your work, meet future colleagues, and learn what other research is being done both in my own field as well as from other disciplines," says Vaquera.
Leah Gordon is a student in the History program and is also a recipient of the Charlotte B. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, as well as an SAS Dissertation Fellowship. "It is a relief to be able to devote full time to research and writing," said Ms. Gordon when asked about the significance of this award to her. She plans on using it to support herself for the remaining year until the completion of her dissertation entitled "The Question of Prejudice: Social Science, Education, and the Struggle to Define the Race Problem in Postwar America, 1940-1970."
A graduate student in Anthropology and a native of Bosnia, Azra Hromadzic is focusing her dissertation on "Emerging Citizens: Youth, Education, Reconciliation in Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina." After having been raised in Bosnia, Ms. Hromadzic lived in a small town that was affected by the war at the time. When the conflict was over in her region, she was offered a scholarship to study at Penn and has already received both a bachelor and a master's degree in Cultural Anthropology. She has received the Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students, as well as the SAS Dissertation Writing Fellowship. "Spencer is really special because of its focus on education - I feel even more encouraged to do my work, and to do it well, because the Spencer experts in education research think it is promising and worth investing in," she says. Ms. Hromadzic is now in Bosnia doing research for her dissertation.
In addition to the honor she just received, Elizabeth Vaquera, a student in Sociology, has been a William Penn fellow from 2001 until 2006. She is also teaching a course on immigration at the University. Ms. Vaquera is entitling her dissertation research, "When Friends Matter: The Impact of Best Friends on Hispanic Racial and Ethnic Differences in School, Engagement and Achievement."