2014 Scholarship Award Winners
Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award
Mai Wang, MFA candidate, Fiction, GRS
Mai Wang graduated from Yale University, where she was an English major in the Writing Concentration. A former beauty blogger, she has written for print and digital publications such as Upstreet Magazine, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Yahoo Shine. In 2013, she was the Writer-in-Residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City, NE. In her writing, she explores themes of immigration and national identity. She is cur-rently working on a novel set in Beijing that is based on her mother’s experience in the Cultural Revolution.
Florence Engel Randall Undergraduate Fiction Award
Julia Chen, BA, English, CAS
Her piece, Autumn In Their Eyes, portrays the small victories that come to define the life of an immigrant woman caught between the hazy sunsets and dusty street corners of 1980s Los Angeles and the life she knew in the rice fields and hospital wards of China. Autumn In Their Eyes, through the protagonist’s struggle to make a life for herself and her daughter in a new country, is a constant reminder of the desperate need to reconcile past and present, old and new.
Florence Engel Randall was the author of six novels and more than one hundred short stories published in literary and popular periodicals. She took great interest in the career of young writers. These awards were endowed by the late Ruth Levine, a member of the faculty of the school of Medicine and a Guild member;
Katherine Connor McLaughlin Scholarship
Katharine Hutchinson, PhD candidate, International Health, SPH
Katharine’s research is in the domain of emergency humanitarian aid to women in humanitarian emergencies. Her dissertation will examine risk factors for women experiencing complications of pregnancy at a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in urban Haiti.
Katherine Connor McLaughlin was an early and active member of the Women’s Guild. Her husband, Jim, who endowed this scholarship, was a doctor at the Student Health Clinic, where he was respected by his colleagues as a diagnostician and beloved by students as a reassuring presence (he had, for their amusement, a large collection of distinctively flamboyant neckties).
Elsbeth Melville Scholarship
Casey Riley, PhD candidate, American and New England Studies, GRS
Casey is investigating photographic travel books and commercial landscape views by nineteenth century British photographers for her dissertation, “From Page to Stage: Isabella Steward Gardner’s Photographic Albums and the Development of a Museum, 1850-1920.”
Elsbeth Melville (CAS ’25), founder of the Women’s Guild, was dean of women from 1945 to 1970, and then the virtually full-time volunteer advisor on alumni affairs to successive CAS deans. A realistic femi-nist, she was mentor to hundreds of BU women individually: supportive of whatever lives they chose and devoted to their development as leaders and public-spirited volunteers.
Boston University Women’s Guild Scholarships
Julia Lima Fleck,,PhD, Systems, ENG
Julia is applying systems engineering methods to the modeling of cancer as a “disease of stages.” This novel approach seeks to model the progression of cancer and also rigorously evaluate cancer therapies to efficiently assess their effectiveness using computer simulation.
Lenora Hammonds, Doctor of Musical Arts candidate, CFA, online program
Lenora has been teaching music pedagogy working on developing vocal jazz pedagogical curricula and programs, instructional books, and online tutorials for emerging music professionals.
Marthe Hesselmans, PhD, Religious Studies, GRS
Marthe is exploring the role of religion in international processes of reconciliation. She seeks to deepen our understanding of how religion today plays a far more complex role in conflict transformation.
Kristina Linden, MSW and MPH, SSW and SPH
Kristina is specializing in trauma, health, mental health, and addiction in her dual degree program. She plans to continue her work in correctional facilities, developing and implementing effective psychoeducational treatment programs for detainees as well as expanding current community outreach programs geared toward at-risk teens to early adults. Her ultimate goal is to work with, educate, and empower young women who have experience with trauma or other negative life events and who suffer from physical or mental health issues as a result.
Caitlin McDonough Mackenzie, PhD, Biology, GRS
Caitlin is conducting field research to measure the impact of climate change on over 700 species of wildflowers at Acadia National Park over 115 years. In addition, she is linking her field work in Maine to changes in the flora of Concord, MA, from Henry David Thoreau’s time to the present.
Meghan Samson , MFA, Sculpture, CFA
Meghan’s advisor, Professor Rune Olsen, says she “explores complex issues around being woman and our shared symbolic consciousness. Her captivating sculptures of figures and animals interacting experiment with the relationships between history, ceramics, feminism, nature and contemporary image making