This summer, students will travel to all corners of the world—from India to Cameroon to Middletown—to conduct University-funded research, financed through a variety of programs, grants and fellowships.

Every year, the Public Affairs Center (PAC) offers a number of Davenport Grants, which provide up to $3,000 for student research in the social sciences. Students use the information they gather in their research for senior theses.

“The purpose of the grant is to enable students to do research over the summer,” Director of the Public Affairs Center and Professor of Economics Richard Adelstein said. “The students are telling us what their thesis is about and what they’ll do over the summer to research [the topic].”

This year, a panel of professors from the five academic departments in PAC—Sociology, Government, History, Economics, and the College of Social Studies—chose 21 grant recipients. These winners will be researching topics from Turkey’s bid to join the European Union to ecotourism in Indonesia.

Devon Golaszewski ’08 plans on using her grant money to travel to Cameroon, where she will do research for her thesis on oral history in the country.

“I applied for the grant in the first place because I was very interested in writing a thesis about Cameroonian history and I couldn’t have afforded the plane ticket without the grant,” she said.

In Cameroon, Golaszewski will live in a small town and record oral histories of events such as the attempted coup against the current president.

“I am really interested in looking at the construction of history as a reflection of cultural values,” she said. “I am planning to compare Fulani [an ethnic group in Cameroon] ideas about a few events in recent Cameroonian history of those of the government.”

Not all Davenport Grant recipients are traveling overseas to do their research, however. Adam Tinkle ’08 will use grant money to fund a three-week road trip through Ohio, New York, and Washington, D.C., where he will visit special collections and libraries to gather research for his thesis, “Representations of Rural America in Culture and Capitalism.”

“I knew the money was available, and I knew what I wanted to write my thesis about and how much preparatory research I would need to do,” Tinkle said. “[I am looking at] movements in music, like folk rock, country rock, the folk revival, together with the counterculture’s ‘back-to-the-land’ movement.”

The Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative Summer Research Grant Program, supported by the Freeman Initiative in Asian/Asian-American Studies, funds student research in the study of Asia and the Asian Diaspora.

“A lot of these [summer research] proposals fill in gaps in scholarship,” Coordinator of the Freeman Asian/Asian American Initiative Stanford Forrester said. “There is always something that was not been addressed and analyzed, and many of the proposals address these issues.”

The 18 recipients will study a variety of topics from different academic disciplines.

“What I love is that this is a very diverse group of students,” Forrester said. “Some are studying topics in the political science realm. Others are focusing their research on religion. We have one student studying movement and dance.”

Daniel Meyer ’08 will pursue his interest in photography with the grant. He will travel to New York City, San Francisco, Raleigh, and Cincinnati to photograph the Chinese American communities in the cities.

“I plan to shoot a mix of candids, portraits and urban landscapes to best capture the life of each community,” Meyer said.

While Meyer will study aspects of the Asian Diaspora through the camera’s lens, Kathryn Zyskowski ’08 plans on studying a similar topic with a focus on political science.

“The focus of my research is the marginalization of Muslims in India,” Zyskowski, who studied abroad in India in fall 2006, said. “I will be returning to India for one month to work with a Muslim Students Association, some professors and an inter-religious NGO [non-governmental organization].”

Zyskowski will return back to the U.S. to do research at institutions with extensive South Asian libraries.

Though many students go abroad to conduct their research, a number of grants are available to students who wish to do on-campus research. The Hughes Summer Fellowships offer students interested in the life sciences an opportunity to do summer research with a faculty mentor.

According to Maureen Snow, an administrative assistant with the Hughes Life Science Program, through the use of financial aid and generous contributions from departments and faculty grants, 56 students were awarded Hughes Fellowships for this summer.

“There are only 20 stipends available through the Hughes grant each year,” she said. “We have always been able to accept more than double than that, [but] this year is a new high.”

Many students feel that the expansion of available Hughes grants represents the University’s increased commitment to the sciences.

“The Hughes grant presents an incredible opportunity for undergraduates to do real research at Wesleyan, which follows with the University’s mission for supporting science at Wes,” said Henny Admoni ’08, who will conduct computer science research this summer.

Admoni’s research focuses on simulating the behavior of independent agents—like the computerized population of the computer game The Sims—as part of a project on artificial intelligence.

“I’m interested in using a psychological theory of mind to represent the mental states of computer agents,” she said.

Whether they are studying autonomous embodied agents or Cameroonian oral history, recipients of University-funded summer research grants will continue to address and investigate issues that are less recognized in academia.