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Summer Research Fellowships Take Students to Different Worlds

Lyne Robert

Jermar Inman

This past summer, the six students who won summer research fellowships traveled widely to pursue a variety of interests. We caught up with three of them last week, all Frances Perkins scholars. Two traveled abroad, while a third spent the summer in a world that's geographically close to campus but psychologically far away, the Springfield District Court.

Lyne Robert, a French major, studied at the Université Laval in Quebec for five weeks. "I was looking at the lives of mothers and grandmothers who had very large families, which is part of my own background. My interest is how religion and the church affected the lives of women in Quebec in the first half of the twentieth century." Robert examined materials in French by women from the period, read books on her subject, and took French courses at the university. "This was my 'study abroad,' since with work and family I can't do a year abroad. I tried to have the experience of immersion in language and culture over the five weeks," she says.

Jermar Inman traveled to Croatia, where she stayed with the family of Josipa Roksa '00. Roksa acted as her interpreter. Inman is an international relations major who studied post-civil war reunification and reconstruction efforts. She interviewed officials and observed conditions in cities and towns throughout Croatia, and interviewed mixed Serb-Croat couples and people of all ages about their experiences before, during, and after the war. "I was so pleased with what I found there," she says. "It was a good model, a prime example of an area with civil conflict which needs to rebuild and reunite its culture and infrastructure."

Inman says she never felt scared, but that the bullet shells that you can pick up along any street and the huge minefield behind the home where she stayed made a strong impact. Inman has created a slide presentation to provide a realistic view of postwar Croatia and the attitudes of its peoples.

Under the auspices of a local judge, Oona Leff studied an issue closer to home: the racial demographics of drug dealers and users in the criminal justice system. She was interested in examining how they end up in court, how they are prosecuted, and the ultimate disposition of their cases.

Leff, a politics major who plans to attend law school and pursue a career in civil liberties or criminal law, was aware that she would never again have the chance to look at the court from a layperson's perspective.

After beginning her summer research, Leff turned her attention to studying police reports, observing arraignments and conferences in court, and reading material on racism in the criminal justice system. "I've seen that the legal system is not that legal and not that systematic," she reports. "The variables include the judge, the prosecutor, and the defendants. Who gets a continuation and who doesn't depends on those variables."