Sullivan Scholars Span the Globe
Photos by Everett Kubala
Thanks to the prestigious Katherine E. Sullivan Scholarship, CLA honors students Ted Meinhover, Mark Foster, and Betsy Burr will enhance their CLA experience with a fifth year of undergraduate study in three different countries next fall.
Meinhover, who majors in global studies (focusing on East/Southeast Asia) with a minor in journalism, plans to study Indonesian and Mandarin Chinese languages. “I like learning about the world, languages and cultures and politics and theory, and being able to communicate [across those cultures],” Meinhover says.
Meinhover’s long-term plans mesh nicely with his fifth-year study experience. “I would like to be able to use my skills in communicating across cultures, doing something that works to the benefit of humanity,” he says.
Foster, a double major in the B.F.A. acting program and anthropology, with a political science minor, will spend his first semester working with the United Nations office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where he will study performance, Swahili, and politics in a postcolonial and post-socialist state. He will spend his second semester as a field researcher with the Jane Goodall Institute in Gombe National Park, examining dominance displays among high-ranking male chimps. He will observe, no doubt, with a keen eye for performance honed by his theatrical training. But he won’t just be studying chimps. His studies will range broadly over “performance, language, diplomacy, and biology.”
In ten years, Foster sees himself “with a Ph.D., working as a director and actor across the globe, exploring how anthropology and theater intersect from the perspective of a practitioner,” and creating work that is “both stimulating and engaging.”
Burr, an anthropology major with an art minor, will take to South Africa her love of archaeological studies. “I decided to transfer to the U of M so that I could start taking more anthropology, including archaeology. My first anthropology class at the U was Intro to Archaeology, and I loved it,” she recalls. For her senior project, Burr plans to measure original rodent fossils at South Africa’s Transvaal Museum. “From this study abroad, I’ll have a graduate thesis ready,” she says. “Graduate school for biological anthropology is very competitive, and this study abroad will give me greater opportunities for continuing my study.”