All News

Although Nicholas Yepes ’15 had traveled to Paraguay just three years ago, he was nonetheless surprised by the precarious state of the indigenous migrant population upon his arrival in the capitol city of Asunción this year. He is seeing some of the most economically depressed areas of Paraguay as he studies how best to meet the basic needs of indigenous migrants through a Levitt Research Fellowship.

Despite being the world’s oldest continuous democracy, the United States has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the developed world. Peter Adelfio ’13 and Benjamin Anderson ’14 have been awarded a Levitt Group Research Grant to study this paradox by conducting a controlled experiment on methods of increasing voter turnout. They’re being advised by James S. Sherman Professor of Government Philip Klinkner.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the forefront of Middle Eastern news coverage, but another conflict of nearly equal importance taking place within the borders of Israel has largely escaped media coverage. As a Levitt Summer Research Fellowship recipient, Joshua Yates ’14 is researching the internal struggle between Israel’s secular Jewish population, which identifies with Judaism but does not strictly adhere to Jewish law, and its ultra-orthodox population of Haredim.  He is working with Professor of History Shoshana Keller.

A Levitt Public Service internship this summer has solidified Jose Vazquez’s ’15 desire to pursue a career in education policy and reform. Vazquez is in Washington D.C. as an intern for The Heart of America Foundation, a non-profit organization that builds libraries for under-resourced schools across the nation.  The organization partners with Target and embarks on their 15th year anniversary building 150+ libraries nationwide.

Whenever a financial institution nears bankruptcy and requests federal bailout funds, it often claims to be “too big to fail.” Unlike the Titanic’s designers who believed that she was too big to physically sink, financial executives hold no illusions about their firms’ lack of invincibility.

Catherine Gold ’14 took advantage of the Career Center’s HamiltonExplore career shadowing program in January by spending a day with Meg Harrison ’91, patient services manager at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in New York City. Now, six months later Gold is a Levitt Public Service Intern there, thanks in large part to the connection she made through HamiltonExplore.

Biology and women’s studies are two concentrations not usually associated with one another. Ashley Perritt ’14, a 2012 Levitt Summer Grant Recipient, plans to bridge this gap with her summer research project, “An Investigation of the Profiling in the Emergency Room.” Perritt will be advised by Elizabeth J. McCormack Associate Professor of Women's Studies Vivyan Adair.

The Levitt Center has announced the 2012 Levitt Summer Research Fellowship recipients and Levitt Summer Research Group Grant Recipients. Twenty-one students will conduct research with 13 faculty members.

Austin Walker ’12 has been awarded a Fulbright Grant to Kenya. He will spend the 2012-13 academic year working on his project “Kenyan Youth Development: Youth as Kenya’s Development Architects” in Nyanza Province of western Kenya. Walker will rejoin the Lwala Community Alliance staff and director Robert Kasabala to build upon the baseline study about youth perspectives on development that they conducted last summer.

To conclude its program series on Security, the Levitt Center brought John Dehn to campus to present a lecture titled “War and the Constitution: Military Commissions, Targeted Killing of Citizens, and Other Hard Cases.” Dehn – a senior fellow at the West Point Center for the Rule of Law at the United States Military Academy – discussed the philosophical, constitutional and legal underpinnings of the doctrine and law of war and the implications they have on the international system, as well as on due process rights of American citizens and foreigners involved in war.