YOU ARE HERE: > Each year, the Radcliffe Institute welcomes a group of fellows from around the world—women and men, scientists, artists, historians, sociologists, economists, and literary scholars—who form a multidisciplinary community. Animated by important questions in fields ranging from genomics, to human rights, to poetics, to mathematics, the Institute is a place of intense intellectual engagement and great energy. Fellows have the opportunity to pursue their scholarly or artistic projects within a community that challenges them to think and to communicate in transformative ways.
Within its broad mandate to include all academic fields and the creative arts in its research and programs, the Institute sustains a special commitment to the study of women, gender, and society.
Here are some of the remarkable 2008 Radcliffe Institute Fellows in their fields:
Anette (Peko) Hosoi RI ’08
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Snails slither across the landscape “like nature’s ultimate all-terrain vehicle,” says Anette (Peko) Hosoi RI ’08. The humble clam burrows at a rate of a centimeter per second. Hosoi, a physicist and associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializes in how small animals move. In her lab, Hosoi and her graduate students study the fluttering, slithering, hopping movements that propel animals from one place to another. Her research group then creates robotic creatures that mimic these movements.
Another case of the natural world inspiring innovations in design.
Mulatu Astatke RI ’08
After conquering the pop charts in his native Ethiopia, originating the musical hybrid Ethiojazz, and composing for the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers, Mulatu Astatke RI ’08 continued his musical explorations at the Radcliffe Institute.
The Berklee-trained composer and multi-instrumentalist worked with electronic specialists to develop a traditional instrument called the krar and wrote an electronic opera, The Yared Opera, which debuted at Sanders Theatre. He also worked with other fellows on an oral history project, exploring cultural creativity in the American Ethiopian diaspora, and performed regularly in the Boston area with the Either/Orchestra.
“It was one of the best years of my life,” Astatke said.
Catherine Lutz RI ’08
Having lost a cousin in a car crash and feeling firsthand the frustration of a car-dependent suburban lifestyle, Catherine Lutz RI ’08, a professor in the department of anthropology and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, turned her ethnographic eye on the place of the car in everyday American life.
She found that much of the research on cars in the United States is historical, not ethnographic. And yet, how Americans relate to the automobile says a lot about collective cultural values and debates.
Lutz is completing research on a book that she hopes will stimulate debate on alternatives to a car-dependent way of life.
Photos by Webb Chappell
