$1000 Award Recipients
Ryan Bressler, Braxton Osting, and Christina Polwarth (Mathematics)
Faculty Advisor: Professor Professor Jim Morrow
Analysis of Dam Failure in the Saluda River Valley
Ryan Bressler, Braxton Osting, and Christine Polwarth entered the Mathematical Contest in Modeling, an international competition. They were given four days to develop a model of a physical situation unknown to them in advance, and to solve it with appropriate parameters.
They worked together as a team, parceling out specific tasks. In the end they had to deduce from the literature the governing laws for flow out of a dam breach and then solve ordinary differential equations. They used 50-year old books (with engineering empiricism before computers) and new books (2002, more advanced because computers are more advanced) and journals. Then they modeled a catastrophic break in the dam and solved hyperbolic partial differential equations, using the topographical maps to determine the needed parameters.
We can report that the capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina was saved from this catastrophic flood. We are proud to add our endorsement to their first prize in the international contest, against over 800 other entries.
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Cameron Geasey (International Studies)
Professor Stephen Hanson
Chained to the Past: The Roots of Russia’s Population Decline
Is Russia finished, as the covers of the Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker have proclaimed in recent years? Is its population doomed to steadily evaporate amid pandemics of STDs, alcoholism, and suicide in a natural environment that has been polluted beyond repair and within a decaying built environment inherited from Soviet times? Cameron Geasey mined the UW Libraries’ print, digital, and microfilm resources to produce a paper suggesting that these dire trends can be reversed.
Cameron’s advisor, Professor Stephen Hanson, suggests that “we are dealing here with a scholar far more sophisticated than the typical undergraduate,” one with “strong Russian language skills, an ability to tackle complex theoretical topics, and excellent writing ability.”
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Jesse Jahnke (International Studies)
Professor Mary Callahan
The “Development Paradox”: The Gap Between Rhetoric & Reality
Service on this “jury” offers an opportunity to read well researched and well written essays on big topics, and Jesse Janke’s study is one of the best. Based upon a critical reading of a rich collection of published sources, it explores a problem of large importance: the failure of agricultural development projects.
“The world community,” Janke writes, “has yet to raise the standards of living for rural peasants in sub-Saharan Africa.” She boldly analyzes the projects, concluding that “the ‘development’ regime of the 70s and 80s set itself up to fail by disregarding or over-simplifying both the power frameworks in the communities… and the complex ecosystems that make large-scale agriculture more difficult in Africa.” Yet she does not stop there. Instead, she also calls attention to alternative approaches, more holistic ones, and does not leave us feeling that nothing can be done to improve the lives of impoverished rural people south of the Sahara.
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Simeon Man (History)
Professor Chandan Reddy
Internationalizing the “Negro” and “Oriental”: Rethinking Race in the Age of Empire
Simeon Man’s essay takes on the challenging assignment of seeking the roots of activist African-American internationalism in the years prior to which it has been located by recent scholarship, namely in the decade immediately following World War I.
The essay’s ambitious research strategy makes extraordinarily effective use of Suzzallo Library’s superb printed and microfilm resources; it crafts its materials into a work of mature scholarship, written with clarity, grace, and exceptional intellectual power.
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Eric Mvukiyehe (Political Science)
Professor Jonathan Mercer
Transnational and Cross-Border Relations: State Failure and the International Spread of Ethnic Conflict in Zaire in 1996
Eric’s sophisticated analysis of the international spread of ethnic conflict challenges existing political theories based on rational choice and cost-benefit analysis. His thesis, “Transnational and Cross-border Relations: State Failure and the International Spread of Ethnic Conflict in Zaire in 1996” examines, in particular, the case of Zaire during the summer of 1996, within the framework of two alternative theories that link the cross-border displacement of refugees and the existence of co-ethnics across borders to the international spread of conflict. He finds that these theories must be coupled with an examination of the host state conditions and the strength of ethnic affinity in order to predict the international escalation of the conflict.
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Kayanna Warren (International Studies)
Professor Stevan Harrell
To Market: China’s Changing Market Participation in Remote Rural Areas
Kayanna Warren’s senior honors thesis in International Studies describes a part of the booming Chinese economy not usually examined. Kayanna, who has a double major in Biology and International Studies, spent a year in China collecting the data that informs her thesis.
In his supporting letter, her advisor, Professor of Anthropology Stevan Harrell, notes the scholarly disciplines whose literature Kayanna explored, including economic development, modern Chinese history, Chinese economic history, agricultural economics, agroecology, and ethnicity and ethnic relations. Impressively, she used statistical and narrative sources in Chinese as well as English. Research tenacity, depth and breadth characterize Kayanna’s efforts in the field and in the library. As Professor Harrell writes, her thesis “is a work that illustrates the usefulness of library collections even when they are not the exclusive source of data or information for a project.”
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