Qiuyuan Chen: Indiana University – Peking University Staff Exchange Program

Qiuyuan Chen, from the Graduate School at Peking University in Beijing, China,
visited the IU campus in the month of January. She was part of
a staff exchange program between IU and PKU.

This January, 2012, the Indiana University Graduate School hosted a Chinese colleague through a staff exchange program between IU and the Graduate School at Peking University (PKU) in Beijing, China. Qiuyuan Chen spent the month meeting with her counterparts at the IU Graduate School, Office of the Registrar and other academic and administrative units.

The lake and water tower in Peking University.
The stone fish in the foreground is a remnant from
the Old Summer Palace just north of the campus.

“I think the biggest difference [between IU and PKU Graduate Schools] is the administrative system. IU is highly decentralized and we [PKU] are very centralized. For us, it’s an office-oriented system, but here it is position-oriented. I think it is easier for us to do teamwork and here literally there is only one person in charge of one field of work and people here are more specialized for that reason. For us, it’s easier to transfer from one office [position] to another,” Chen said.

“Some of the ordinary processes are similar,” she said, "and there are many common elements between our universities.”

For example, PKU and IU have about the same number of students and both universities have a strong focus on the arts, languages and humanities as well as the natural and social sciences. To give a localized comparison, if PKU is like IU, then TsingHua University, next door to PKU in Beijing, is like Purdue.

The PKU Graduate School is located in Red Building No. 2.
The PKU campus was originally in a hutong area in downtown
Beijing, but in the 1950s it moved to an old palace grounds in the
northwest part of Beijing. The Graduate School is located in one
of the traditional style buildings from that palace.

“We also seem to have similar problems,” Chen said. “Students have a lot of pressure surrounding their dissertations both here and in China, especially the doctoral students. I spoke with an IU graduate student who attended PKU for her undergraduate degree, and she said it can be difficult to get the desired job after finishing a PhD because doctoral students want the invested time and money in their education to be returned. Students in China have the same career pressures.”

“These days graduate educators in China are paying more attention to quality rather than just quantity,” Chen said.

“I believe that PKU and IU will discover they have a lot they can learn from one other. The exchange program is a good way to help us to communicate, and itself is a good example of graduate education internationalization as well.”

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Media Contact: Erika Lee, ebigalee@indiana.edu

October 2011 Graduate Student of the Month: Ishani Banerji

Ishani Banerji 
Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences 

Ishani Banerji

IU graduate student Ishani Banerji is enamored with the academic lifestyle.

“To me it seems like the perfect life, which probably makes me a huge nerd,” Banerji said. “But my favorite part of America is academic campuses. I feel the most at home on academic campuses; they’re familiar to me, comfortable. I know what is expected of me, I know the culture and I love that to some extent everyone here is engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. I just love it.”

“[For my undergraduate degree,] I went to this tiny liberal arts college called Denison University [in Granville, Ohio] where you simply have to form relationships with the people on campus. The faculty was so supportive, they were always there for me and became like a second family. For me, I really loved that idea of having that relationship and being embedded in this network of people who all really, really care about education.”

“At Denison, I was able to do a lot of research as an undergraduate because there aren’t any grad students. So I knew I loved doing research and [when I was working on my master’s degree] at Wake Forest I got to do a lot more research, particularly cross-cultural research, which I had become interested in my senior year of college.” she said.

At the big social psychology conference in January the year Banerji was looking for a doctoral program to join, she met a lot of graduate students from the places she would be interviewing with later that semester.

“As I was applying to Ph.D. programs, IU wasn’t my top choice. I thought who wants to be in the Midwest surrounded by cornfields? Then at this conference, I met a lot of students who barely gave me the time of day. But the IU students—I mean, the entire department—came to my poster presentation. They were all there and making that effort to make me feel welcome and I hadn’t even decided where I was going to go yet.”

It was at this same conference where she first met her current advisor Dr. Eliot Smith.

“Until that point, I felt that there were two kinds of faculty; the super-brilliant, super-productive, big names in their fields, but kind of [arrogant], and the faculty who are understanding and friendly, but haven’t done as much with their careers. The faculty I had met who were well-known in the field were just not people who I could look up to socially and personally. Dr. Smith is brilliant, but is totally un-egotistical about it,” she said.

“That brought me to IU.”

“I struggled a lot [with the decision] because I had other highly-ranked options, but because of my experience at Denison, that kind of colored it. I knew I wanted a place where I would be comfortable because you don’t want to be in a Ph.D. program that is highly ranked, but then hate yourself every day for three or four or five or six or however many years you’re going to be there [because you don’t feel like you belong]. It’s not worth it.”

Banerji is currently at the start of her fourth year. She took her qualifying exams last year.

“The social psychology program within the psychology department is the only one that has exams, like actual exams, whereas all the other programs do papers. It’s a two-day exam with three or four questions to answer each day, and about four hours a day to do so. It’s a summer of reading as much as you can and memorizing as much as you can because you can’t bring anything into the room when you take the exam,” she said.

“All the more senior students will tell you that the faculty aren’t interested in setting you up to fail—they want you to succeed, you’re going to be fine. So look at it as an opportunity to read a lot, and learn a lot and really get embedded in the literature; that all sounds fine, but before you take the exam it’s still really, really scary. But now, post-exam, that’s exactly what I’m telling the students who are taking it this year.”

At IU, Banerji’s research has taken a lot of different lines. She studies group emotions, an interest she picked up from working with her advisor, but Banerji gives it a cross-cultural twist.

“[Group emotions are] the emotions you experience when you think of yourself as a member of a certain group. So the emotions you would feel as a woman, or as an American, as opposed to the emotions you feel just as yourself,” she said. “My first project, which has now become this monster of a project that has taken me three years to get done is looking at American, Chinese and Germans [participants]. I have collaborators in both of those countries—it was actually amazing how I found those collaborators because nobody in my department does cross-cultural work,” she said.

The German collaborator was a graduate student from the University of Hamburg that she met at the annual social psychology conference. The Chinese collaborator is a more round-about story.

“We had a speaker from the University of Chicago come to the department to give a talk. I met her over lunch and was talking to her about my project and how I really wanted to collect some data from Asia. She said she knew this professor who teaches in New Zealand who happened to be going to China to give some talks. She put me in touch with him and he found two students in China who were interested in collaborating with the project.”

“It’s wonderful to me that the faculty in my department are so supportive of students doing work with other people. Right now I’m collaborating with three of the four faculty members in my department, including my advisor. This year I’ll be at Santa Barbara to work with my advisor’s collaborator, Diane Mackie. Santa Barbara has a much more diverse population so some of the research I’m interested in doing—looking at some of these various racial differences, stereotypes and prejudices, I can do over there a little bit more easily than at IU,” she said.

“It feels great to know that you have multiple lines of research and that there are multiple people out there that you can turn to for feedback and advice and just work with,” Banerji said. For example, in another line of Banerji’s research, she is working with another of her advisor’s students, Dr. Charles Seger, who recently graduated and is currently teaching in the UK.

“There has been a lot of research that suggests that when you have contact with the members of an out-group, so say white people interacting with African-Americans, that your prejudice towards that out-group goes down and you have a more positive outlook. So, research in this area has come up with lots of different versions of this main idea of contact. What I became interested in is the idea of physical contact, but not with the people of the out-group, but with the products of the out-group,” she said. This resulted in Banerji teaming up with Dr. B J Rydell on a project involving turbans.

“In the first study I did, we gave people turbans and we either had them look at the turban, or look and touch the turban if they wanted to, or they got no exposure to the turban. Then we measured their prejudice towards Muslims.” They are now repeating this study with do-rags and measuring prejudice against African-Americans.

“For the turban study we found that seeing the turban had some prejudice-reducing effect, but it was touching the turban that really seemed to make a difference. We’re hoping to see the same thing with the do-rag,” she said.

“I’m also going to be doing a study with Charlie in the UK where we’re going to be giving people hummus either labeled Nigel’s Bean Dip or call it something in Arabic with Arabic writing all over it. We’ll ask the subjects to taste it and we’ll measure their attitudes towards Muslims.”

“So that is the basic idea—that a lot of the time, when you’re interacting with a different culture, it’s not with the people, it’s seeing CNN’s coverage of terrorists or going to an ethnic food restaurant,” she said. “It’s all exciting.”


Media Contacts:
Erika Lee, Director of Communications, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu
Ana Saraceno, The IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization, gpso@indiana.edu

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization and the University Graduate School would like to congratulate Ishani Banerji on receiving the GPSO/UGS Recognition Award. Students selected for this award were nominated by a faculty member from within their department, and selected by the GPSO and UGS for excellence in their graduate studies at Indiana University. 

McNair Director Cathi Eagan Retires After 34 Years of Service to IU

In August of 2011, Cathi Eagan, long-time Director of Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program and Assistant Dean at the University Graduate School, retired from IU, but from what we hear she will continue to be busy! The staff at the University Graduate School would like to wish her the best. Here is her story of the time spent with us and a peak into her new endeavors. 

When Cathi Eagan joined the University Graduate School staff in 1993 as an Assistant Dean, the first thing she noticed was that there weren’t a lot of programs at IU to groom undergraduates for graduate school.

Eagan at her retirement party in August 2011.

 “I became interested in finding funds,” Eagan said, “an external grant, to be able to create a program. One year I went to the CGS (Council of Graduate Schools) meeting and sat next to someone who had a McNair Grant. It was the first competition that McNair had had and she had had her program for a couple of years. It was Vicki Kirby from the University of Missouri in Columbia.”

Inspired by that conversation, Cathi arranged to go to a grant writing session in Washington D.C., spoke with a lot of the McNair programs that existed at that time, and then wrote a proposal to create a McNair Scholars program at IU. The purpose of the program would be to help prepare students from diverse backgrounds for doctoral programs.

“So I took what I learned from the other McNair programs and what I knew from the Biology program (where she had worked previously on The Hughes Grant) and I wrote the grant,” Eagan said. “We were funding in 1995 and I’ve been working with the program ever since.”

“I think the strength of the program is that it’s an academic year program where we can get to know 25 undergraduate students very well—their personal, financial and academic background—and we can groom them into mini graduate students by the time they reach their senior year,” she said. “At that point, the students have had an undergraduate research experience, and they’ve had teaching training and teaching internships, so when they apply for graduate school their funding comes from either an AI or TA, or a fellowship of some type.”

“Over the years, perhaps the first eight years of the program, we had difficulty in learning how exactly we could prepare these students for graduate school so it didn’t interfere with their senior year. What we used to do was hold a lot of the workshops that we now hold in the summer in the fall—workshops to get them ready to apply to graduate programs. It was really getting in the middle of their academic work,” Eagan said.

“One day I was driving into work—and I still remember it—I thought what if we took one week in the summertime and we just compiled everything to help the students learn about fellowships, write the draft of their personal statements, get GRE training? And what if to pay for this, we had programs from around the country come and we could bring in the best and the brightest lecturers for these students—that’s how the senior summer camp was born,” she said. “It’s a very effective tool—we can prep our students in the summertime and they can have everything done so in the fall so they’re ready to submit applications for fellowships and graduate school.”

The senior summer camp is now in its eleventh year and it’s been duplicated in California, Chicago and by several institutions in the South. The camp lasts five days and is held in a remote location to limit distractions. Students learn about life as a graduate student, from how to be successful in their programs, to what to do if they run into complications within their departments and how to solve these situations, to how to strategically take the GRE. There is also a push to develop grant and fellowship writing skills.

Eagan is an integral part of the The Canine Express,
a group that transports shelter dogs from Indiana
to areas of the country where spay and neuter laws
have limited the number of animals for adoption,
giving the Indiana dogs a better chance at being adopted.

“They learn about fellowships, where the money is and that they need to apply for these things,” Eagan said. “Last year we had the Rhodes Scholarship recipient and the runner-up, we’ve had people who’ve gotten a Mellon Fellowship, Jacob Javits Fellowship, and so on. And I think it’s because we’ve forced them to apply to these fellowships. Even if they’re turned down, the student now has a better understanding for how to write a grant proposal and they can apply to other grants even as a graduate student.”

Even before the idea for the senior summer camp, Eagan had been invited to be part of the Penn State TRIO training team.

“I would go around the country; I did this each month for 5 years. At first I was doing GRE training and then it got so I was preparing staff for how to write fellowships and identify where the money was,” Eagan said. “And that’s where I met Orlando Taylor, Don Asher, so many of the TRIO people who are really heavy hitters. Those are the people that I invited to come to the senior summer camp. And that’s how we have so many dynamos who help us prepare our students.”

Eagan said she is looking forward to retirement, and although she’ll miss the students greatly, “it’s time to move on after 34 years.”

Over the last 25 years, when she wasn’t on campus working with students, Eagan has been working on issues of animal welfare. For the last seven years, she has taken her vacation days once a month to drive to New England with the CanINE Express; an organization that has transported more than 7100 shelter dogs to partner shelters in New England. 

“In New England, the spay-and-neuter message has been heard. So the shelters there are sitting virtually empty of well-socialized, healthy dogs ready to be adopted,” she said. 

Eagan is currently working to introduce better spay-and-neuter legislation in Indiana, writing grants for shelters, and taking care of her 88-year-old mother and her home. “For me, as long as I’m in Indiana, I’ll be devoted to stopping the killing of companion animals. It’s atrocious what’s happening, not only in IN, but also the Midwest and the South.” 

McNair Scholars Students Receive Awards and Visit from Program Founder Carl McNair

McNair Scholars Class of 2011 with Director Cathi Eagan (right), Dean of the University Graduate School James C. Wimbush (center, back), and Program Founder Carl McNair (center, front).

Graduating seniors in the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program were honored at the Annual Graduate Student Awards Reception on April 28, 2011. Many received awards for not only their participation in this nationally recognized program, but also for their stellar academic achievements.

“It was a wonderful year,” Director Cathi Eagan said. “All of our graduating students were accepted into graduate programs, and many have received amazing funding opportunities to further their studies.”

This year graduate students Esther Uduehi and Isak Nti Asare received the McNair Scholar of the Year Award. Esther will be studying at Oxford University in England next year on a Rhodes Scholarship and Isak recently received the Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Award, funded by the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation.

The McNair Director’s Award, an award for a student who went above and beyond the guidelines of the McNair Scholars Program, went to Jaycee Bingham. Jaycee applied for the most large, external fellowships this year.

“Applying for grants like with the Ford Foundation is a huge amount of work,” Eagan said, “and Jaycee applied for five of these.”

Also attending was Carl McNair, brother of Ronald E. McNair, namesake of the program, and President of the McNair Foundation, who flew in just for the event.
“This was the same day he was supposed to fly down to see the NASA space shuttle lift off the next day. He told NASA that he had a prior commitment, so they arranged to have him fly back out the next morning at 6am so he could make it in time for the launch,” Eagan said. “That’s how dedicated he is to these students and this program.”

The goal of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars program is to prepare low-income, first-generation, and minority undergraduates for graduate study at the doctoral level. The program began with 14 programs in 1987, and it now comprises 200 programs across the country and in Puerto Rico, including four McNair Programs in Indiana. McNair Scholars is part of TRIO, a group of federally-funded college opportunity programs, administered by the U.S. Department of Education.

McNair Scholars Class of 2011

Adrienne Anderson, graduating with a B.A. in Psychology. Accepted to graduate program in Clinical Psychology at the University of Dayton with funding.

Jaycee Bigham, graduating with B.A. in Spanish and Anthropology; certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Accepted to doctoral program in Cultural Perspective and Comparative Education at the University of California Santa Barbara with funding.

Gregory Ryan Briles, graduating with a B.A. in American Studies and History minor. Plans to apply for doctoral programs in American Studies and American Culture this fall. Working with Americorp the coming year.

Robin Coleman, graduating with B.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies and a minor in Fine Arts (Studio art with concentration in ceramics). Accepted to graduate program in Africana Studies at Cornell University with funding.

Desiree Cossyleon, Graduating with a B.A. in Neuroscience and Spanish with minors in Linguistics and Chemistry. Desiree is a Wells Scholar and a Lugar Scholar Recipient. Desiree applied and was accepted into several neuroscience graduate programs, but she decided to accept a teaching post with Teach for America. After Teach for America, Desiree will be pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience.

Magortu Emmanuel, graduating with a B.A. in Biology and African American and African Diaspora Studies with minors in Public Health and Chemistry. Accepted to the graduate program in public health at Tulane University in Louisiana.

Shannon Utam Moses, graduating with B.S. in Kinesiology and Dance with a focus in the Anthropology of Dance. Accepted into the one-year graduate program of Performance Studies , with $40,000 funding, at New York University’s Tisch School, the #1 ranked school in the world for performance studies.

Isak Nti Asare, a Wells Scholar, graduating with a B.A. in Political Science and Linguistics and a minor in African Languages. Accepted to graduate program in Development Studies at the University of Oxford in England. 2011 Elvis J. Stahr Distinguished Senior Award. Finalist for the 2011 Rhodes Fellowship. Named the 2011 Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship recipient (The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), a fellowship worth $44,000/year for graduate study.

Kimberly Sanders, an Adam Herbert Presidential Scholar, is graduating with a B.A. in Sociology and African American and African Diaspora Studies. Accepted to the graduate program in African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University with funding.

Kayla Scroggins, graduating with a B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in History. Accepted to the graduate program in History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington with funding.

Nathaniel Shannon, graduating with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Neuroscience. Accepted to the doctoral program in the Cognitive Division of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago with funding.

Nathen Steininger, graduating with a B.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures, Religious Studies, and Sociology and a minor in Psychology. Accepted to the graduate program in the School of Social Work at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.

Esther Uduehi, Wells Scholar, graduating with a B.S. in Biochemistry and Mathematics. Accepted to the graduate program in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford in England. While at IUB, Esther has been named a Richard G. Lugar Scholar, received the Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis Scholarship and the Elvis J. Stahr Distinguished Senior Award, and has served as Vice President of IU’s Board of Aeons. Named a 2011 Rhodes Fellow.

Alexandria White, graduating with a B.A. in Sociology. Accepted to the graduate program in Student Affairs Administration in Higher Education at Ball State University with funding.

Ariana Zarate, graduating with a B.S. in Public Health. Accepted to the graduate programs in public health at Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis with funding.

May 2011 Graduate Student of the Month: James Paasche

James Paasche
Department of Communication and Culture
May 2011

When you meet IU Graduate Student James Paasche you can’t help getting caught up in his enthusiasm for movies and music, but you will also quickly notice that his interests run deeper than a “thumbs-up” review. Paasche wants to know what media means in day-to-day life and what it’s like for average people to be everyday media producers. His path to graduate school as a first generation college student was not exactly straightforward – the typical pipeline of high school to college to graduate school had turns and bends in it. It’s also immediately clear that his life experiences are a bonus in his research, and that he is an important addition to ongoing discourse on amateur media happening in departments like IU’s Communication and Culture.

“I was away from college for eight years being in a band and touring the country. I worked for an interesting group where I taught students with learning disabilities how to read and comprehend what they’ve read,” he said. “But probably the main thing I did was work at record stores and video stores and cinemas. I was trying to count it up, but I think I’ve worked in five different record stores, four different movie theatres and three different video stores.”

“Media and pop culture were an everyday part of my life and at some point I realized that media wasn’t just about a financial transaction. I really started to understand the affective ties people have to media and music and film, and that peaked my interest,” he said.

Paasche finished qualifying exams and is now in the process of writing a prospectus. His dissertation will focus on the amateur media environment in Vietnam in all its various forms, such as film, newsletters, magazines, newspapers, and audio letters made by soldiers and sent home. The idea, he said, is to acknowledge current day interest in amateur media, but to also “give a nod to historical precedence.”

The act of writing a prospectus, he said, is like doing research on his research project and a big part of it is figuring out the scope of his project.

“For example,” he said, “the Vietnam War is my time frame, but I might have an epilogue where I discuss the relevance to the current Iraq/Afghanistan war because there is a huge proliferation of video letters home on YouTube and sites like that because it’s a way for soldiers to communicate with their families back home. I just find it fascinating that such a private thing like a letter could become such a public thing.”

Another reason Paasche wants to focus on the Vietnam War is because he wants to work on a project that incorporates film and not just digital video.

“I want to talk about film stock – the material – which we don’t do much anymore. There are a lot of fantasies about the utopian possibilities of technology, but we don’t really talk about what it means to have that camera in your hand or what it means to have to send that film somewhere to be developed. In many cases, Vietnam soldiers were probably never watching their messages over there – they’re sending them home – so they’re eventually sitting in someone’s garage or attic. What does it mean that someone would create this media then never see it again? It’s different from what current and future film makers do,” he said.

“Every day of working on my prospectus I’m learning new things – like how a lot of film and photographs went missing after being confiscated from dead soldiers, so the surviving films – no one knows who shot it or who the people in it were now. So, this process of preparing for a large research project is about preparing and educating me as well. I’m looking for archives, veterans groups, and other data sources right now, and I’ve started to make contacts on a larger context – like sons of guys who were there and relive those memories through their father’s roles there.”

“I want to incorporate film, but I also want to think about media in a larger context as well because there were a number of newspapers being made by soldiers at the time and many of them are documents of people who are disagreeing with their government at a fundamental level, and these are the people over there fighting for the government. It can be a form of resistance as well. Another example like this is pirate radio broadcasts.”

As Paasche defines the limits for the project and looks for funding, requests IRB approval and works through other hoops that are part of beginning a large research project, he makes sure to find time for the environment that led him to finish college and pursue graduate school in the first place by working a few shifts at Landlocked Music here in Bloomington, Indiana.

I really enjoy the atmosphere in music stores, he said, but “I know now I also want to be more critical of my media practices and I want other people to have that ‘ah-ha’ moment. I want my students to have that moment of not just accepting these things as forms of entertainment but forms of culture that say something about us in a larger sense.”

“That’s really what got me here.”

For the past three years, James Paasche has organized and run Home Movie Day—an annual event that connects the university with the community in a celebration and screening of home movies.  (See the press release:  http://newsinfo.iu.edu/web/page/normal/15811.html)  Home Movie Day is held all over the country, and James took the lead in bringing this important event to Bloomington.  He has been able to establish important collaborative connections with the Black Film Center/Archive and the new IU Cinema, helping to assure that IU will continue to host this unique event.

This October, 2011, Home Movie Day will be held at the new IU Cinema. Part of the event this year will be an hour of curated home movies from various IU archives such as from the Kinsey Institute, Black Film Center/Archive, and Fine Arts.

Paasche will also be co-programming City Lights, the classic Hollywood film series, next year for the Department of Communications and Culture and the IU Cinema.

Media Contacts:
Erika Lee, Director of Communications, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu
Angela Jones, The IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization, gpso@indiana.edu


The Graduate and Professional Student Organization and the University Graduate School would like to congratulate James Paasche on receiving the GPSO/UGS Recognition Award. Students selected for this award were nominated by a faculty member from within their department, and selected by the GPSO and UGS for excellence in their graduate studies at Indiana University.

Graduate Student of the Month: Nicole Willock

Nicole Willock
Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies
April 2011

When Nicole Willock was 18, she didn’t know that studying Chinese would change her life. Currently a graduate student in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies at IU, Willock said her desire to research Tibetan culture began when she was studying abroad as a young adult.

“It’s a passion for me to study and I think as a grad student you have to have that passion and tenacity to keep going. An important part of where that comes from is my own personal experiences studying abroad,” said Willock.

Her adventures began when Willock traveled to China to study Chinese at Sichuan University and film at the Beijing film academy. She also visited Tibet for three months and that experience in particular motivated Willock to want to understand Tibet’s place in China and how those diverse cultures interact.

After a year and a half in China, she began a Master’s degree program with a major in Chinese literature and a minor in Tibetan language at Hamburg University in Germany. She also spent time teaching English as a second language for the university and various language companies.

“At the time, I knew I loved to teach and in particular, to teach about China, but it was hard to marry those two in Germany,” she said. “Up to that point, I was ambivalent about being a professor, but I knew I wanted to study Tibet and the best place to study Tibetan is IU; it has one of the best departments in the country. My advisor Dr. Elliot Sperling speaks Tibetan and uses both Tibetan and Chinese language source materials. He’s one of only a few people who can do that.” She also works closely with Dr. Gendun Rabsal from the IU Department of Central Eurasian Studies, who was instrumental in helping Willock select source materials and the subject of her dissertation.

The religious studies part of her doctoral work came from her deep interest in intellectual history. Willock said she likes understanding how people think, and in Tibetan society, those intellectuals tended to be religious figures. Taking classes in religious studies gave Willock the foundation she needed to approach her doctoral research.

“I love Chinese culture and Tibetan history and sometimes it’s a clash and sometimes it’s harmonious. The paradoxes have driven me to figure that out and it still does. I have friends there, both Tibetan and Chinese, and those personal connections and experiences have driven my work,” Willock said.

Willock’s work on Tibet is hagiographical, she said, meaning she studies the lives of saints. “Hagio” means saints or holy people, and “graphy” essentially means to study. Her dissertation takes a multidisciplinary approach to the life and writings of a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and monk named Tseten Zhabdrung Jigme Rigpe Lodro (1910-1985). Tseten Zhabdrung is interesting as an intellectual figure, Willock said, because he was well respected by both Tibetans and Chinese.

In 2008, Willock travelled to China and Tibet for field research on a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Based at Qinghai Nationalities University (in Xining, Qinghai Province), she traveled to six monasteries where Tseten Zhabdrung had resided. She also interviewed former students from when he taught classes at secular universities, several of whom now have important intellectual positions in Tibet today as deans, research scholars, writers and editors.

This semester, Willock is revising her dissertation while teaching a course on the politics of religion in modern China at the University of Boulder in Colorado. She plans to defend this summer and graduate in August.

Fluent in German, Tibetan, Chinese, Willock has received a number of awards including the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation. She has presented her research in the US, Canada and Europe and currently holds her the Department of Religious Studies’ Dissertation Fellowship. Additionally, Willock is the only graduate student participating in a five-year seminar on Tibetan literature taking place in the American Academy of Religion at the University of Virginia. The seminar focuses on how Tibetan literature is seen in the academy and in general.

Media Contacts:
Erika Lee, Director of Communications, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu
Angela Jones, The IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization, gpso@indiana.edu

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization and the University Graduate School would like to congratulate Nicole Willock on receiving the GPSO/UGS Recognition Award. Students selected for this award were nominated by a faculty member from within their department, and selected by the GPSO and UGS for excellence in their graduate studies at Indiana University. 

2010 University Graduate School Annual Report

 

The University Graduate School promotes and supports excellence in graduate education for individual students, faculty, departments, and the university as a whole.

The 2010 University Graduate School Annual Report

Learn more about graduate education initiatives at IU, as well as nationally and internationally.

The University Graduate School's Fourth Annual Graduate Awards Reception

On Friday, April 9, 2010, the University Graduate School congratulated winners for the following fellowships and awards at the Wells House.  Best wishes to all the recipients!

McNair Scholars Class of 2010
Ashley Carrasco
Troy Cummins
Camille Dantzler
Rebeca Hernandez
Chere’ Hunter
Angele Marandet
Chinyere Cheryl Nwokah
Christina Stigger
Sharday Summers
Alexandria White
Candice Williams

McNair Scholars Alumni Award
Edward Vargas

Graduate McNair Fellowship Recipients
Paul Chris Eells
Kaylah Lalonde
Jason Qualls
Evanna Singh

Graduate Scholars Fellowship Recipients
Jerrell Allen
Danielle Fernandez
Jennifer Anne Hill
Jose Lugo Martinez
Zuryanette Reyes Borrero
Gabriel Serna
Michael R. Smith
Raynetta Wiggins

Educational Opportunity Fellowship Recipients
Linda Adebola Adebisi
Laura Alvarez
Charles Aull
Cameron Beatty
Thea Bennetti
Hailee Carter
Lynda Enemuoh
Antonio Estudillo
Jacklyn Farris
Diane Glossen
Charlene Grant
Zachary Kelly
Mohammad Khan
Donald Maxwell
Korryn Mozisek
Michael Ndemanu
Jason Oberle
John Putz
Francisco Ramos
Amanda Rollins
Robin Smith
William Smith
Earlene Taylor
Wanbdi Waci
Kimberly Waite
Malsi Zambrano

Future Faculty Teaching Fellowship Recipients (10-11)
Galia Benítez
Heidi Bludau
Alicia Ebbitt
Keith Eberly
Xin Fan
Allison Foley
Eric French
Garrett Hansen
Alfio Saitta
Paul Schauert

Grant-in-Aid Doctoral Research Recipients
Sebastian Carassai
Louise Dubin
Jennifer Eastwood
Todd Foster
Polly Husmann
Anne Michelle Lawing
Alison Mero
Christopher Molnar
Jihyun Nam
Mira Rosenthal
Firat Soylu
Laurel Stevenson
Travis Vogan
Chunyun Wang
Sheng Yuan

Grant-in-Aid MFA Project Recipients
Sara Brooks
Annie Campbell
Garrett Hansen
Amanda Lee
Chelsey Radabaugh
Rachel Seed
Nishiki Tayui

Pari Prerana Award Recipient
Farkhat Yussupjanov



Adam W. Herbert Graduate Fellowship Recipients
Brett Jefferson
Erikka Vaughan

Wells Graduate Fellowship Recipients
Jonathan Atwell
Oren Pizmony-Levy

Esther Kinsley Master’s Thesis Award Recipient
Steven Stanzak

Esther Kinsley PhD Dissertation Award Recipients
Jorge Henao-Mejia
Clara Henderson

John H. Edwards Fellowship Recipients
Emily Bowman
Rebecca Riall
Abbey Stemler

GPSO Faculty Mentor Award
Professor James Pershing

Wells Fellowship goes to an ELPS student for second consecutive year

The University Graduate School would like to congratulate the 2010-11 Wells Graduate Fellowship recipient Oren Pizmony-Levy.  

For the second straight year, a student from the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies (ELPS) department in the IU School of Education has won the prestigious Wells Graduate Fellowship. Oren Pizmony-Levy has received the fellowship for 2010-2011. Pizmony-Levy is a double major in Education Policy Studies and Sociology.

The award carries the name of Herman B. Wells, IU president for 25 years and then Univeristy Chancellor until his death in 2000. In his estate, Wells provided for an annual graduate fellowship. The fellowship will be awarded each year to students who demonstrate the qualities for which Chancellor Wells was renowned: leadership abilities, academic excellence, character, social consciousness, and generosity of spirit.

This is the second straight year an ELPS graduate student has claimed the award. Payal Shah, a comparative education PhD candidate in policy studies, was the recipient for the 2009-2010 school year.

(3/2/2010)

Science Cafe: A Sustainable Consumer Culture? Is that Possible?

Thursday, January 21, 2010
Presented by Dr. Richard Wilk, IU Department of Anthropology

All Science Cafes are held at BORDERS in the Seattle's Best Cafe, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m.

We live on a planet where there are simply not enough resources for everyone to enjoy the consumer lifestyle of prosperous Americans. Is it possible to lower our impact on the environment, becoming green consumers, so we can continue to enjoy our comforts without destroying the planet at the same time? Many people argue that it should be up to individuals to make the right choices, and that free markets are the best way to promote sustainability. I will talk about experiences with 'green consumerism' in Europe and the USA, and open up a discussion of what other kinds of options might be open to us.

For more information visit http://www.sciencecafebloomington.org

The Bloomington Science Cafe is sponsored by The University Graduate School.