Alumni Spotlights
Honors Alumni Awarded $10,000 Scholarships
The Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine recently announced the recipients of this year’s Jerry A. Zinni, D.O., Memorial Scholarship. The year, two of the four recipients of the scholarship are third-year medical student Timothy Neely of Ravenna and fourth-year medical student Sana Hasan of Kent.
The scholarship, which is funded by the Northeastern Ohio Healthcare Foundation, is a $10,000 award given to each of the four medical students and may be used toward the cost of tuition, room and board, textbooks and other educational related expenses.
Douglas Antibus, Honors Alumna
Doug has been selected as one of the three winners of the national Portz Scholars competition. The Portz Scholars program was developed by NCHC to honor and reward the best undergraduate scholarly papers in any discipline. To read an interview conducted with Doug, please click on the above link.
Quinn Dalton
Quinn is the author of a novel, “High Strung” and a story collection, “Bulletproof Girl.” Her stories have appeared in literary magazines such as Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, and One Story. She was a 2002-2003 recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council fellowship. Recently, Quinn completed her second story collection, “Stories from the Afterlife.”Quinn completed her Senior Honors Thesis with Hilton Landry. She reports that she, “was particularly impressed by the Honors College where she had the best things of both the large and small institutions.”
Quinn and her husband, David Mengert, live in Greensboro, North Carolina, with their two children, Avery and Alia
Stories For Airports
By: judy b.
Honors alumna Judy Bryan--now officially judy b.--has published her first collection of short stories. They are set mostly in her current home town of San Francisco and offer nuances of insights into human relations, missed communications, and chance encounters, in a highly compressed style with sharply observed detail and often sad ironies.
Laura Bender Herron, 2005 Honors graduate summa cum laude with Departmental Honors in history, was named a 2005 Portz Scholar by the National Collegiate Honors Council. Each year NCHC selects for this honor the three best papers submitted by honors programs and colleges nationally. This is the third time a Kent State Honors student has received this prestigious recognition.
Laura’s paper, selected by the Honors College as its submission, was her senior thesis, “Redemptive Memory: The Christianizing of the Holocaust in America,” directed by Professor Richard Steigmann-Gall. Laura presented the work at the national conference in St. Louis in October, was recognized at the President’s Luncheon, and was given an award stipend.
The editor of the Journal of the NCHC, Ada Long, was so impressed by Laura’s presentation that she asked to publish the thesis in slightly abridged form in the Journal. It was published in the Fall/Winter 2005 issue (6:2), prefaced by the following paragraph:
The centerpiece of this issue of JNCHC is an outstanding essay by Laura Bender Herron. . . . [Her paper] is a thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and intellectually sophisticated analysis of the way the Holocaust has been transformed within the collective American memory into a narrative that Christians can find comfortable and comforting. Choosing three examples to illustrate her thesis—the movie “Schindler’s List,” Corrie ten Boom’s memoir The Hiding Place, and The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—Herron demonstrates that the American version of the Holocaust, more myth than history, represses the fact that Hitler’s Germany was a Christian country, foregrounds the tiny number of Christian “rescuers” to make them the heroes of the story, and distorts the events of the Holocaust into a story of Christian redemption. Herron’s argument is far more complex and subtle than I (perhaps anyone) can summarize. The essay needs to be read in its entirety, and fortunately such a reading is pure pleasure and excitement from beginning to end. It is one of the finest pieces of undergraduate scholarship I have ever read, and honors administrators would do well to assign it to their students for its educational value and also as a model of scholarly research. (13)
We are indeed proud of Laura’s work and her recognition! She presented this paper again at an interdisciplinary conference on the Holocaust at Bowling Green State University in March.
Laura also received the 2005 Nels Andrew Cleve Paper Prize awarded by the Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society for her essay on 19th-century Jewish immigration to the U.S., and she presented that paper, “A Brother in Israel,” at the national convention in Philadelphia in January. She is also a member of Pi Sigma Alpha, the political science honorary. She was named the first Wilma J. Crawford Senior Thesis Fellowship recipient. Laura is currently a master’s student and teaching assistant in history at Kent State.
Dorn Wenninger
Dorn Wenninger, a 1990 graduate of Kent State University with a degree in international relations and Spanish, has gone on to achieve fantastic things in life. Dorn currently lives in London, England and is the Vice President of Driscoll’s Strawberry Associates. He is responsible primarily for the company’s European business and spends most of his life on a plane traveling between Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and the U.K. Dorn, who says that he has traveled to at least 66 countries, still enjoys traveling for leisure (e.g. Iceland, Oman, and Tanzania) and participates regularly in triathlons, as well as the Prague Marathon two years ago. Dorn said, “My days in Kent prepared me surprisingly well for all this. With an undergrad degree in Spanish and International Relations, I can say with certainty that I’m applying my education every single day of my professional life.” Dorn also holds the Honors College in very high regard, stating, “The Honors College is a very special place. It’s an island of bright and motivated students and professors. It helps make Kent State a well-balanced education for even the brightest of students.”
Jeff Hammond
Honors alumnus Jeff Hammond won last year’s “Life in Ohio” essay competition sponsored by Ohio Magazine. His piece entitled “Standard of Ohio” was published in the magazine’s October 2003 issue and describes Ohioans’ self-irony, sense of normalcy, and sense of the weird. In 2002 Kent State University Press published his memoir about growing up in Findlay, Ohio, Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern, which was a finalist for the Independent Publisher Book Award: Essays/Creative Nonfiction. Jeff received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English also from Kent State, and he is currently George B. and Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He has published three scholarly books and numerous articles and has won numerous essay prizes.
Liliana Poole, Recent Honors Alumna
In February 1996, Liliana Patricia Echeverri Florez was working as a secretary at a coffee company in her native Colombia. Into her office walked Steven Poole from Ohio to arrange for the installation of a new packaging machine. Liliana did not speak English. Steven did not speak Spanish. Six months later after many international phone calls aided by an English/Spanish dictionary and a friend of Liliana’s who spoke English, they were engaged! When Steven went to visit Liliana’s family, they were not able to communicate very easily. Her family had many reservations about sending their only daughter so far away with a stranger. Liliana’s brother mentioned, “The gringo looks nice.” The wedding was on.
Steven sent Liliana a beautiful wedding gown in March 1997 for their April ceremony. What Steven did not realize was that Liliana had sent him her measurements in metrics. He purchased the dress using U.S. inches. The Colombian seamstress who remade the dress for Liliana delivered the gown minutes before their ceremony.
After one week of marriage, Steven had to return to the U.S. It took Liliana four months to get her visa to come and live with her new husband. When she arrived in Cleveland, Steven was on assignment in Texas! He did not return until the next day. Liliana’s new in-law family met her at the airport.
Liliana immediately started on a crash-course to learn English. She worked with two tutors and watched a lot of television news programs. These were long and lonely months for the young bride who missed her friends and family in Colombia, and whose husband had to travel a great deal on business. Liliana knew Steven was a fine man, but she began to doubt her decision to live so far from home. She returned to Colombia in 1998 but after six weeks there, she returned to Ohio with Steven.
In the summer of 2000, Steven suggested that Liliana take some courses at the Trumbull campus of Kent State. Her father-in-law taught her to drive and suddenly Liliana found herself in yet another new life—a college student! In late November, Liliana will return to Colombia to visit her family and celebrate her August 2004 graduation from Kent State and the Honors College before she starts her job search in the field of International Relations.
Liliana admits that the transition to life in the U.S. was not easy, but she would make the same decision today. However, she wishes more Americans had a greater appreciation for their opportunities for educational and economic growth, which are hard to come by in Colombia. Liliana is also grateful for the house she and her husband own and the security of life she has experienced here.
In the time between her August graduation and late fall visit to Colombia, where Steven will join her for the holidays, Liliana wanted to volunteer. She chose to donate her time to the Honors College! During her two months with us, Liliana’s warm smile and professional manner charmed staff and students alike. She brought new life to our office and taught us so much about a new culture. Lilli now works at Cnd. We will truly miss Liliana’s presence, and we thank her for all that she has done for us. She truly embodies the best qualities that we hope for in an Honors student and an Honors alumna.