University Students Win Prestigious Fulbright Grants

Four University of Rochester students have been awarded Fulbright Fellowships to study abroad during the 1997-98 academic year.

The fellowships, open to seniors and graduate students, allow recipients to work on self-designed research projects anywhere in the world. Former Fulbright Fellows include television journalist Garrick Utley, composer Philip Glass, senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and astronaut Ronald J. Grabe.

Matthew Allen, a senior physics and optics major from Newark, Del., will travel to Osaka, Japan, to study at the Institute of Laser Engineering at the University of Osaka. He plans to study how Japanese scientists research inertial confinement fusion, a potentially pollution-free energy source for the future.

Natasha Goldman, an art history graduate student from Rochester, N.Y., will pursue her project "Exile, Images, Iconology: German Jewish Art Historians and the Writing of a Discipline" at the Kunstgeschichtlichte Institut in Hamburg, Germany. She will look at how the cultural identity of German Jewish art historians influenced their shaping of the discipline of art history in the United States, focusing in terms of memory, iconology, and gender.

Tait S. Keller, a Take Five history major from Newark, N.Y., will research "Art, Culture and National Consciousness in Post-War Austria" at the University of Vienna. He intends to focus on how post-war literature, art, and drama cultivated the development of national consciousness in the Second Republic.

Amber Phung, a graduate student at the Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, will research "Cross-cultural Factors in the Experiencing of Traumatic Events." A resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., Phung will study at the National University of Singapore, looking at culture-bound differences in expression of trauma victims' symptoms.