Erin Fitzgerald
Undergraduate, International Relations (Specialist) and Political Science (Major)

Top scholar, community activist, campus leader and internationally ranked athlete — Erin Fitzgerald is very much the definition of an engaged university citizen. So it’s not surprising that the Victoria College student has also just become one of two Ontarians and 11 Canadians to earn the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford in the fall of 2010.

Erin is completing a degree in international relations and political science. Her current scholarly interest, which she plans to pursue at Oxford, is the nexus between the military and humanitarian spheres. It was first sparked in the summer of 2009 when she worked as an intern researching civil-military relations in stability operations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

Erin has also put her intellectual pursuits into action. As chair of U of T’s G8 Research Groups — a global network of scholars, professionals and students that monitors and reports on the actions of the G7 and G8 — she is leading a team of student analysts researching how the G8 member states will meet their objectives at the 2010 summit in Huntsville. As a student representative on the University Affairs Board — a position she was motivated to apply for when she served as president of the Hart House Debating Club — she considers non-academic policy and matters that directly concern the quality of student and campus life. “Hart House does a really great job of making sure that students have a stake in governance; the University Affairs Board position has given me that kind of experience at the university level,” Erin says. She believes that having a student voice on these committees is critical because “the decisions they make impact students in very meaningful ways.”

Erin is, moreover, an amateur athlete. A black belt in karate, she represented Canada at the Chito-Ryu World Championships twice and won gold in cadet women’s sparring and in team sparring in 2007. Although now retired from competition, she still coaches and runs clinics at her dojo.

Erin credits her ability to take advantage of so many co-curricular and extra-curricular activities to awards she received, such as the Mark Adler Undergraduate Scholarship in Political Science and the Meltzer Memorial Scholarship in International Relations. “Attending G8 summits and conferences and undertaking internships can get really onerous financially. Without the scholarships I received throughout my undergraduate years, I don’t know that I would have been able to do any of these activities,” she says. “This kind of support is really critical: it allows students to devote more time to projects that can enrich the academic experience and create well-rounded citizens. An investment in scholarships really in an investment in the next generation of innovators.”

Story by Diana Kuprel
Photo: Diana McNally

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Eve Jihyun Lee
Undergraduate, Astronomy (Specialist), Mathematics (Minor)

Even before she had completed third grade, Eve Lee was a devoted stargazer. Peering through her telescope at the night sky, she learned to identify the major constellations. She watched every space documentary on TV and ready widely on planets. By age 15, she could work through the calculations to prove Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion.

After such a prodigious start, the rigors of academic astronomy were a sobering surprise. Eve admits that she often had to reread her textbooks several times before they made any sense. But her perseverance paid off. Now in her third year, she is the recipient of the 2009 John Pounder Scholarship in Astronomy and Astrophysics, as well as a past winner of the Donald MacRae Scholarship in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Although she had only basic training in astronomy, Eve won herself a spot on a research team working on the Substellar Objects in Nearby Young Clusters (SONYC) project. Supervised by Professor Ray Jayawardhana, Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics, Eve contributed to the findings, and in 2009, earned a co-author credit on the team’s first peer-reviewed publication in The Astrophysical Journal. More recently, she has studied the morphology of cluster galaxies with Professor Howard Yee, Canada Research Chair in Observational Cosmology. The work involves analyzing a galaxy’s shape to determine its stage of evolution and its interactions with other galaxies.

The demands of hands-on research forced Eve to acquire skills which are rarely taught in a classroom. She learned how to code computer routines which filter noise from technical data, and hot a crash course in multi-object spectroscopy, used to classify brown dwarfs. She also sharpened her presentation skills, and can now distill pages of analysis into concise conclusions.

“Stars and planets have always intrigued me,” says Eve. “I’ve worked on the observational side so far. I’d like to get an overview of the theoretical side of stellar and planetary astrophysics before continuing on to graduate studies.”

Story by Brendan de Caires
Photo: Derek Shapton

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Katie Edwards
PhD Candidate in History

While poring over newspaper archives in Montreal in 2003, Katie Edwards noticed a curious gap in modern French historiography. Although much had been written about France’s Nazi collaborators and the country’s uneasy relationship with its imperial past, contemporary scholarship had left the Republic’s silence over the war in French Indochina relatively unexplored.

The bilingual New Brunswick native was delving into the public memory of France’s colonial conflicts for her graduate work at Concordia University. Earlier that summer, she had interned at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade at the Canadian embassy in Paris. While there, she organized the archives for the Canada-France Program, then celebrating the quadricentenary of the permanent French settlement of Canada. Her experience gave her insight into the politics of public memory and the uses of history, and helped to shape her Master’s thesis. But the subject was clearly ripe for a more comprehensive treatment.

Katie subsequently joined the doctoral program in the U of T’s Department of History, to work with Professor Eric Jennings, a leading authority on French colonialism. The more than a dozen distinctions and grants which she has received since starting her PhD — among them the prestigious Vivienne Poy Chancellor’s Fellowship in the Humanities and the Rene Efrain Memorial/Ontario Graduate Scholarship in the Department of History — have allowed her to conduct months of research at the national archives in France, to develop her hypothesis and to make an exploratory visit to Vietnam.

“Scholarships give me the luxury of uninterrupted research,” says Katie. “But I also love mentoring and teaching. It’s exciting to watch students question historical sources and interpret current affairs through the lens of modern history. Once they realize that the past is always with us, they connect, for instance, French attitudes to Indochina with America’s towards Vietnam, or the use of torture in Algeria to what has happened in Guantanamo Bay. I think that’s the historian’s task — to show how the past continually informs the present.”

Story by Brendan de Caires
Photo: Derek Shapton

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Tikvah Fund Scholars

The Tikvah Fund is supporting 18 undergraduate and graduate students affiliated with the Centre for Jewish Studies. Here are stories of 4 of the 2009 recipients (pictured from left to right: Paul Nahme, Merom Kalie, Arielle Lewis, David Belfon)

Paul Nahme
PhD Candidate in Philosophy and Jewish Studies

When Paul Nahme first heard Professor David Novak lecture, he almost gave up philosophy. Speaking without notes, the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair in Jewish Studies causally quoted texts in several languages — some living, some dead — apparently unaware of his students’ bewildered silence. Fortunately, Paul had completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy and was prepared to proceed stoically. Professor Novak eventually became his doctoral supervisor, encouraged him to master new languages and steered him towards the 19th-century Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. In addition to looking at Cohen’s attempts to recast religious insights in secular language, Paul’s dissertation examines how Islamic jurisprudence may have influenced the political though of the 12th-century rabbi Maimonides.

Merom Kalie
PhD Candidate in Political Science and Jewish Studies

After earning his MA from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Merom Kalie joined U of T’s doctoral program in political science in order to explore ethics and solidarity in the work of Martin Buber and Albert Camus with some of the leading scholars of political theory and Jewish thought. Merom is enjoying the experience of living and studying in multicultural Toronto. “What’s impressed me is how the University of Toronto takes care of its students,” notes Merom. “Not only does it offer remarkable facilities, it also creates an atmosphere that genuinely encourages study and research.”

Arielle Lewis
Undergraduate, Jewish Thought and Ethics Society and Law (Double Major)

In high school, Arielle Lewis noticed Talmudic echoes in Plato and wondered what would happen if she re-read scripture through a secular lens, as both a scared text and an historical artifact. A born debater, she was eager to engage with philosophy, politics and religion and did not hesitate when it came time to elect a discipline at university. She is now doing a double major in Jewish thought and in ethics, society and law. “Science was too black-and-white,” Arielle says. “I’m very into the grey.”

David Belfon
MA Candidate in Religion and Jewish Studies

David Belfon has always been intrigued by the complex interactions of different faiths. The MA candidate in religion and Jewish thought is delving into Catholicism’s tentative rapprochement with Judaism after the second Vatican Council.

Story by Brendan de Caires
Photo: Derek Shapton

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