The awards ceremony, which takes its name from the ancient Greek word for trophy, honors graduating seniors for their outstanding accomplishments, both within and outside of the classroom. This year, Alanna Cronk (C’23) was awarded the Coakley Medal, Alisa Colon (C’23) the Kraft Medal and Sam Telesa (C’23) the Louis McCahill Award. Amira Ali (C’23) delivered the Cohonguroton Address.

Alanna Cronk

Alanna Cronk, who is Ventureño Chumash, received the Coakley Medal, which is awarded annually to the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences senior who, in the opinion of the faculty, most embodies the “qualities of loving service, honor and courage in all phases of their college life.”

Cronk, a philosophy major with minors in English and public health, has been active on campus since arriving as a transfer student from Chapman University just two years ago. In that time, she has received a multitude of accolades, including the Ryan Medal, bestowed by the ; the Hypatia Diversity Prize, awarded by the academic journal Hypatia; the Penner Research Award, given through the and the G+JI Fellowship, awarded by the .

Cronk recently submitted an honors thesis titled “Community vs. Carcerality: Weaving Logics of Care in Policy and Programs for Indigenous Peoples Experiencing Suicidality.” According to Cronk, she’s been interested in the carcerality of psychiatric care since taking her first disability studies course with , an adjunct lecturer in the .

“In my thesis, I wanted to integrate the things I had learned about Indigenous philosophy and the practical knowledge I was gaining in public health,” said Cronk. “As a Ventureño Chumash person, and given that American Indian/Alaska Native peoples have the highest rates of death by suicide, I felt really compelled to spend time breaking down how the medical and legal systems fail to provide equitable care, cause harm while proposing some theoretical and practical solutions in this space.”

She has worked as a research assistant with , an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, helping coauthor a paper on federal identity recognition politics and their impact on indigenous and disability communities.

“I do not hesitate when I write that Cronk is the very best student that I have had the opportunity to work with in my career,” wrote Nahwilet Meissner.

In her time on the Hilltop, Cronk also served as a board member of the Circle of Indigenous Students’ Alliance (CISA), where she developed a partnership between the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and CISA that allows students to access the museum’s archives.

“I have learned a great deal about myself,” said Cronk of her time at Georgetown. “The incredible resources here allowed me to develop the best parts of myself and challenge myself in ways that made me so much stronger. My time at Georgetown has taught me about the importance of community and developing relationships. The work I have done with the University has always involved collaboration, and working in partnerships always brings together diverse energies that create amazing outcomes.”

Cronk is excited for the next chapter in her life, embracing graduation with the nuanced perspective of a philosophy major.

“Life constantly changes, and I want to move with it,” said Cronk. “I was grateful every day I was here. I take away enormous amounts of appreciation for my brilliant friends, my incredible Professors, the gorgeous land around campus and, of course, the warm memories of late-night Wisey’s runs.”

The Coakley medal was established in memory of Henry “Hank” Coakley, a Georgetown alumnus and U.S. Air Force pilot, by his wife, Elizabeth Coakley.

Alisa Colon

Alisa Colon received the Kraft Medal, given to the graduating student who embodies a “spirit of humility, cooperation and commitment as a woman or man for others in all facets of college life.”

Originally from the Boston area, Colon has made the most of her time on the Hilltop, majoring in justice and peace studies and minoring in women’s and gender studies. Colon worked as a teaching assistant for , an associate professor in the Department of English, with whom she took several classes.

“Ms. Colon distinguished herself as an insightful reader, thoughtful interlocutor and creative thinker,” said Phillips. “She has a real talent for unpacking difficult theoretical texts and translating them into colloquial language for her peers.”

Outside of the classroom, Colon has been consistently active and engaged. She co-founded the Black Survivors Coalition, a student-run organization dedicated to empowering sexual assault survivors. She also served as a student representative on the Main Campus Core Curriculum Committee’s Engaging Diversity Revision Subcommittee and as the vice president of programming for the Interhall Council. Last summer, Colon interned with PwC through a program focused on nonprofit consulting.

The Kraft Medal was established by Mrs. Cornerlia Kraft McKee in memory of her mother, Katherine Kraft. 

Sam Telesa 

Sam Telesa received the Louis McCahill Award, given to the student of the graduating class who has “shown perseverance and determination of a high order in pursuing his or her educational objectives at Georgetown.”

Telesa is a student-athlete and anthropology major who balanced his time between the classroom, the weight room and the gridiron. Born in American Samoa and raised in Hawaii, Telesa was able to connect his coursework in anthropology with his own family’s history, dissecting the complex relationship between colonialism and academia.

Telesa is part of the Baker Scholars Program, a highly-selective and prestigious program open to students in the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences who possess a demonstrated interest in business and have strong records of academic achievement, community service and leadership.

Professors and coaches alike have noted Telesa’s natural leadership ability. Telesa served as co-president of the Georgetown University Christian Athletes organization and led weekly chapel services for the football team. 

Alongside a demanding academic and athletic schedule, Telesa worked several jobs, as a curriculum assistant for the Georgetown Scholars Program, a site coordinator for the Washington National Youth Baseball Academy and a field engineer intern for a local construction company. After graduating, Telesa will pursue a graduate degree and play football at the University of New Mexico.

The McCahill Award was established in 1960 by Mr. Eugene McCahill and Mr. Francis McCahill in memory of their brother, Louis, who died in the service of his country in the First World War.

Amira Ali

Amira Ali delivered the Cohonguroton Address at the invitation of the dean, Rosario Ceballo. Taking its name from the Algonquin word for the Potomac River, the Cohongurton Address is delivered by one of the graduating class’s most outstanding students.

Ali, a double major in psychology and government, has been active inside the classroom and around campus during her time at Georgetown. While on the Hilltop, Ali co-founded Guzaarish, a competitive Bollywood fusion dance team that has traveled to five competitions across the country and was invited to perform at Vice President Kamala Harris’ Diwali party. Ali also served as president of the GU Moot Court Team and co-student director of the Georgetown Chapel Choir. 

In her remarks, Ali highlighted the names of Georgetown’s unsung heroes, including Washington Walker, a GUTS bus diver; Mo Ogbes, a security guard at Lauinger Library and Lindbergh Barrett, a member of the facilities team for the Village C residence hall.

“That’s the beauty of this campus community – in the ICC, in the VCW lobby, at the Lau 2 tables at 3 am, I have found more love in the corners of this university than anywhere else,” said Ali. “And that’s why Mo, Washington and Lindbergh matter so much: They care for and from the corners.”

Ali encouraged the gathered graduating students to make the most of their education by shaping the world around them with the tools they’ve acquired at Georgetown.

“At Georgetown, we were taught how to grapple with the challenges of our generation – to see innovative solutions, to see things deeply, to see what could be rather than what is,” said Ali. “Georgetown gave us the space to experiment to this end, to imagine our future free from the confines of what is strictly practical, to imagine all that is possible.”

After graduating, Ali will work as a national security paralegal for Morrison & Foerster, a legal practice located in Washington, DC.

Marc Howard

, a professor in the , received the Bunn Award for Faculty Excellence. , a program associate in the (PJI) accepted the award on Howard’s behalf and delivered remarks.

Established in 1967 to honor Rev. Edward B. Bunn, S.J., the award is chosen by a vote of the senior class and presented to the member of the ������̳ faculty who “is admired and respected by all students for their service to Georgetown in the classroom and on the campus community.”

Howard is the founding director of the PJI, which houses a slew of programs aimed at addressing the mass incarceration crisis. Within the PJI, Howard teaches the popular Making an Exoneree course, in which students investigate likely wrongful convictions and produce short documentary films highlighting those cases. To date, five exonerees, including Jones, whose stories have been told through the class have either been exonerated or released.

In addition to the Making an Exoneree course on campus, the PJI has an impact off the Hilltop. The PJI’s Prison Scholars Program gives incarcerated individuals in Washington, DC and Maryland the opportunity to take classes while in prison and eventually earn a degree from the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences. Their Paralegal Program, in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Returning Citizen Affairs and the DC Department of Employment Services, gives returning citizens a path to a paralegal career. The Pivot Program awards a non-credit-bearing certificate in business and entrepreneurship to formerly incarcerated individuals, which is awarded on the basis of both academic work and supported employment.

and review the full list of awardees.

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BUNN AWARD 

The Edward B. Bunn, S.J. Award for Faculty Excellence was established in 1967 to honor Rev. Edward B. Bunn, S.J., for his years of devotion and service to Georgetown University as president and chancellor. Each year, the senior class selects a faculty member to receive the Bunn Award, and it is presented during the ������̳ Tropaia Exercises.

This year’s winner was Sylvia Önder, teaching faculty in Turkish and Anthropology and head of the Turkish Program.

In her speech, Önder reflected on the many ways that she had witnessed her students thrive despite the pandemic and encouraged the class of 2021 to celebrate their many accomplishments. 

“This year, from on campus, around the country and all over the world, Georgetown students have shown that they are fierce when they need to be – calling out Racism and Islamophobia, building and strengthening needed networks such as the Asian-Pacific Islander Leadership Forum,” says Önder. “…You should be so proud of what you have accomplished and feel energized and confident about what you can do in the next phase of your life.”

FLL Service Award

The Faculty of Languages and Linguistics Distinguished Service Award is presented annually to a member of the FLL faculty who has made extraordinary contributions to the programs and mission of the FLL through his or her research, teaching, and service to the community. This year, Heidi Hamilton, a professor in the Department of Linguistics. 

“Recognizing her many contributions to the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University, and to all concerned with discourses of health and illness, we are proud to recognize Prof. Heidi Hamilton with the 2021 FLL Service Award,” says Lisa Zsiga, chair of the Linguistics department. 

During her speech, Hamilton spoke of the importance of branching out from what is known and gaining knowledge from other languages and cultures. She recited an excerpt from a collection of letters Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet) that emphasized the beauty of patience and inquisitiveness. 

“Rilke’s words embody my hope for you, dear graduates, as you take the next steps in your life, that you can remain patient in the understanding that the uncertain, puzzling, and unpredictable nature of the problems you’re passionate about will keep you attentive, will keep you listening and looking,” says Hamilton. “I know I speak for my faculty colleagues when I express my gratitude to you for sharing your time, creativity, intelligence, and boundless enthusiasm for life with all of us — both inside and outside the classroom. By deciding to dedicate your years at Georgetown to the study of languages and linguistics — either as your singular focus or in connection with other fields — you have chosen to problematize and to amplify your engagement with the world.”

“The Racial Justice Speaker Series represents one part of the necessary work we must do to recognize and then act on the deeply embedded racial inequities in our society,” says Christopher Celenza, dean of Georgetown ������̳. “Our diverse and interdisciplinary speakers will bring different perspectives to this ongoing conversation. I appreciate the work they are doing and am honored that the ������̳ will be hosting this series.”

Research and Racial Justice

These conversations invite faculty from various departments and programs across campus, including the , the , the , and the . 

, vice dean and Idol Family Professor of the ������̳ of Arts and Sciences says that the title of the series draws from Esther 4:14. 

“I understand this passage as a call to action and responsibility for those put in positions of power,” says Colbert. “The series will consider how Georgetown faculty’s research advances racial justice and how racial justice produces certain responsibilities for researchers. We will consider how the pursuit of justice informs the impact of each speaker’s work, understanding that pursuit as a fundamental part of being a faculty member at Georgetown.”

This series is part of the new Racial Justice Initiative which will be formally launched through Georgetown ������̳ next semester. It’s first course, Anti-Black Racism: History and Ideology, Justice and Resistance, will be taught by Colbert and , a professor in the African American Studies department. 

“Racial justice and anti-racist praxis require a mastery of the histories that created, cultivated, and exacerbated racial inequities, and that threaten to make these inequities insurmountable without thoughtful, systematic, and energetic thinking, planning and implementation,” says Patterson. “This course equips students with both the knowledge and skills necessary to think about and enact racial justice, exploring the complexities, complications, and contradictions that emerge when trying to create a beloved community and more perfect union that center Black communities and Black citizens.  

“Situated firmly in the historical and pedagogical mission of Black Studies, this course equips students to address these opportunities,” he concludes.

These conversations have been scheduled from 12:00-1:00 pm EST on Wednesdays throughout the month of October, starting on Wednesday, September 30, 2020, and concluding on Wednesday, October 28, 2020.

To watch the series, please visit our .

Adapting to Change

As the university moved to a virtual learning environment to halt the spread of COVID-19, students were asked to return to their permanent residences, including those 300 students who were studying abroad. 

Amid the rush to return home from locations all over the world, several Georgetown students found that the courses they were enrolled in abroad were canceled or greatly amended by their host institutions. This could have caused them to lose all of the credit they would normally have earned for that semester.

Vice Dean of Georgetown ������̳ and Vice Provost for Education chose to combat this by creating the 

Students self-registered for this amended semester, selecting their classes from a list of 15 courses after consulting with their dean. Some of these classes fulfilled core requirements, while others were more specialized. COVID-19: Theory and Action in a Time of Pandemic (GUGC-0321) however, was an entirely new course created just for these students.

About the Course

professor, director of the Regents Science Scholars Program, created the new course.

“In our planning, we conceived of a team-taught, interdisciplinary course that would speak to this moment by focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic through multiple perspectives,” says Lorenson. “Professor Elmendorf pulled together an all-star cast of faculty from a myriad of disciplines and designed a spectacular curriculum for our students.”

Elmendorf assembled 18 different faculty members from nine different areas of study to take turns teaching the students individually or in pairs through modules that cover a variety of different subjects related to COVID-19. 

The modules cover topics such as the science of the virus and our responses to it, public health strategies, the lessons of history, the role of government, cultural perceptions and behaviors of people that produce risk and transmission. The course also looks at the political consequences of delaying action or ignoring public health.

Lemonade From Lemons

Georgetown ������̳ Assistant Dean Mike Parker, who leads one of the modules on immunology, said he hopes the course will be “a synthesis of technical knowledge development, acquisition of multi-disciplinary perspective toward international crises, and self-reflection toward coming to terms with ongoing personal and collective pandemic predicaments.”

“Our new course, COVID-19: Theory and Action in a Time of Pandemic, is a prime example of making lemonade from the lemons our students have been given,” Parker says. “Giving these students the knowledge of how pandemics start, how we can resolve the issues that arise during pandemics and what we can do to prevent the next pandemic, should not only help them frame their current experiences within a broader worldview but also empower them to meet these challenges head-on in the future.”

There are currently 12 students enrolled in the course, which takes place every week through virtual Zoom meetings. The students have met with several of the professors in the few weeks since the start of the course and say they can already see the positive impact that it has had.

“I feel like I am being an informed citizen and also learning about something pertinent,” says Ryley Zapien (C’21) who just returned from studying abroad in Australia. “If this happens again, I feel like I could help based off the knowledge I have acquired in this course. I am grateful to Georgetown for giving us these wonderful online classes that have made it is easy to transition in such a chaotic time.”

Name

Bianca Uribe

Hometown

New York City

Major

Minor

Research activity

Received both the Kalorama Fellowship and the Scott MacPherson Stapleton Award.

Developed an independent research project that was conducted internationally in various towns in Peru and domestically in the NYC and DMV areas. The project focused on how Afro-Peruvians (and Afro-Latinos in the US) develop informal systems of healing in response to inadequate health care systems. It was found that health care and treatment can be culturally specific for marginalized communities and how institutions in power need to build cultural competency in order to ensure successful community outreach.

Most influential professors

, , and 

Campus and community activities

Student of Color Alliance (SOCA) Co-chair (2015-2016)

Spanish & Portuguese Club – Director of Publicity (2015-2016)

Beeck Center – GU Impacts Fellow in Lima, Peru (2017)

Post-college jobs/accomplishments

I got married on October 13, 2018.

Advice for other students

Don’t feel pressured by other people’s timelines and societal expectations of success. Build your own timeline of success. All that is meant for you will come your way if you are intentional and deliberate in your actions.

How has your curriculum influenced your career plans

As an Anthropology major with a Portuguese minor at Georgetown, I’ve learned that looking outward often helps in understanding what is within. To me, being a Foreign Service Officer means deepening one’s knowledge of other cultures and nations to further understand our own. I was given the opportunity to learn this at Georgetown, an institution that promotes international service through Jesuit values, such as being a “woman or man for others”. There I was able to strengthen my love of studying and apply my learning in both Latin America and Africa.

Life goals

To become a successful, intersectional, thoughtful and critical U.S Diplomat with years of service in Latin America and Africa. And to make my mother proud.

Favorite spot on campus

The ICC. I had most of my classes there and worked for four years at the African Studies Program.

De Luna will make several trips to a small village in central Zambia as part of an international research team over the next three years. Her team will work alongside , which brings Georgetown students to take part in field research during a five-week summer session.

BEYOND INSTRUMENTAL APPROACHES

De Luna will seek to challenge the assumption that environmental change and other structural factors served as the primary drivers of population expansion in central Africa between the 6th and 16th centuries. Along with colleagues and , she will pioneer an interdisciplinary approach that factors cultural change into such large-scale historical analyses of the spread of populations and language families.

“Climate, disease, and subsistence were key concerns for early communities, but these instrumental explanations are overrepresented in scholarship,” de Luna said. “This masks the role of creativity, curiosity, and cultural values in shaping decisions about where to live and what languages to speak and teach your children in earlier time periods.”

De Luna provides a modern example for her theory: One Georgetown student might decide to learn Mandarin Chinese for career advancement purposes, while another makes the same decision based on cultural interest or heritage. The former student is responding to changes in technology and large-scale global trends; the latter is simply interested in learning more about the culture. Both contribute to the spread of the language, but only one is acting in response to the type of change scholars of premodern history often focus on.

“In our attempts to understand early history — where historical actors can’t speak for themselves through documents or other traditional sources — scholars tend to focus on instrumental explanations,” de Luna said. “We’re trying to get at cultural practices, which might not follow the ‘logic’ we would expect to influence choices, but that nevertheless shaped processes like population and language expansion.”

BUILDING A TEAM

An archaeologist in the Rice Department of Anthropology, Fleisher worked with de Luna to plan a conference on interdisciplinary approaches to early African history while they were colleagues at Rice in 2012, opening a conversation about collaboration.

Following the successful conference, the two joined Pawlowicz, an archaeologist from VCU, to explore how to bring together linguistic, archaeological, and ethnographic sources in their research. In 2018, Fleisher and de Luna published a book reflecting these discussions, .

For de Luna, a historian by trade, working directly alongside archaeologists sparked her to pursue a longtime interest. She applied for and won a , which helps early-to-mid-career scholars in the humanities explore a new field of interest. She begins a Master’s degree program in archaeology at Yale University this year, during which she’ll learn to conduct archaeological analysis and work with specialists on technical examination of archaeological objects.

“For me, this opens entirely new ‘archives’ for times and places where we have no documents to tell us about life in the past,” de Luna said. “Of course, archaeologists have been doing just that for decades. But as the Zambia project demonstrates, bringing a humanities perspective to the social sciences similarly changes the approaches and questions we ask of artifacts and historical objects.”

THE THRILL OF DISCOVERY

The project will directly incorporate students from Georgetown’s Africa Field School, a new study abroad program run through that students to conduct field research while living in Zambia for five weeks.

The highly selective program focuses on building a cohort with a diverse array of majors and backgrounds in order to further contribute to the interdisciplinary nature of the research team. Undergraduate and graduate students from any college or university are invited to apply.

“We need physics and math majors as much as we need historians and climate scientists,” de Luna said.

At the Field School, students spend five weeks in field methods — interviews, excavations, soil samples, isotope analysis, and more — while developing their own, smaller research projects to complement the larger questions that de Luna and her colleagues are tackling. The new initiative is designed to give its students a better sense of the research process.

“In class, students see the polished, final versions of research findings in articles and books,” de Luna said. “By participating here, they not only share in the thrill of discovery, they learn the iterative, uncertain process of asking questions, trying to answer them, and adjusting for new findings along the way.”

De Luna expects the field research experience to serve her students well long after they leave history and anthropology classrooms.

“What better way is there to learn critical thinking and a healthy skepticism for official information, whether it’s news reporting or peer-reviewed research?” she said.

The five-week Africa Field School summer study abroad program is open to both undergraduate and graduate students from Georgetown or any other college or university. For more information on applying to the Field School,

February 6, 2018 — Scholars in the natural and social sciences have long advocated for rigorous study of the way humans and the environment interact. A group of professors at Georgetown is bringing a humanities perspective to the table.

Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change is a series of lectures, art installations, and group discussions that critically examine the ways humans interact with and change their environments. It is funded through the as part of the , which support comparative research on history and contemporary culture.

NATURE AND CULTURE

Professors and of the began meeting to discuss the subject of environmental humanities in 2015. A relatively new field, environmental humanities seeks to use humanistic methods to think about the interaction between people and the environment.

“In the old days, there were questions of literature in nature — things like ‘What did Thoreau say about nature?’ — and those were interesting questions. But in environmental humanities, we believe this category we call ‘nature’ is up for contestation,” Hensley said. “This era is breaking down the distinctions between what is ‘nature’ and what is ‘culture,’ when we have human activity legible all around us.”

Hensley and Luciano sought to bring together similarly inclined scholars from across academic departments and even outside Georgetown.

“Until now, there was no forum at Georgetown for humanists to exchange ideas about how our disciplines can contribute to solving the current environmental crisis,” Luciano said. “Much of the problem is cultural — how did we develop the attitudes about resource extraction and habits of energy use that cause climate change and environmental degradation, and how do we motivate people to change those attitudes and practices?”

DIVERSE BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE

Along with , who has appointments in the and the , Hensley and Luciano developed a proposal for a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant to fund humanities-focused research and programming on the “Anthropocene,” which refers to the proposed geologic epoch during which humans have come to shape the Earth’s environment.

In 2016, the Mellon Foundation named the Anthropocene project one of its two-year grant winners. In addition to events and materials, the grant funds a postdoctoral fellow in environmental humanities, , and two graduate fellows, in history and Megan Dean in philosophy, each of whom was given an opportunity to lecture on her area of expertise.

“It was amazing to bring their different bodies of knowledge and sets of concerns and questions into the conversation,” Luciano said.

Events sponsored by Approaching the Anthropocene began in the 2016-17 academic year with one all-day symposium and one graduate student conference, but it was in the Fall 2017 semester that programming truly kicked into gear. Events included a workshop for writing on climate change, a poetry symposium, and an interdisciplinary discussion on water.

“People tend to think of action on climate change at the international level, with things like the Paris agreement. … We’re trying to think about actions at a personal level, and even in unofficial and sometimes surprising forms like arts and performances,” Hensley said. “One of our events started from a basic question that a student asked: How do you write about the climate?”

COLONIALISM AND CLIMATE

This semester’s events examine the issues raised by climate change and environmental degradation through a postcolonial perspective.

“We’re looking at the moral and political dimension of what climate change means,” Hensley said. “There’s a huge focus this semester on the relationship between imperialism and colonial activities — the political infrastructures — and climate justice. We’re looking at the human dimension of this massive inter-species problem we’re facing.”

“Indigenous Peoples and Climate Justice: Resisting Ecological Colonialism, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” a lecture by , kicked off Approaching the Anthropocene’s spring semester events on Wednesday, January 31.

“Whyte connected climate issues to the question of justice, centering Native American history and knowledge,” Luciano said. “Indigenous scholarship on climate change builds on longstanding traditions of attending to seasonal variance, as well as the way Native Americans have been subjected to rapid climate and environmental change because of colonial displacement.”

CONTINUING DIALOGUE

Approaching the Anthropocene serves as what Hensley calls a “pop-up humanities center” on the Hilltop, enabling faculty and students from all disciplines to come together and discuss important issues. While the Mellon Foundation funding ends after this year, the Seminar’s directors aim to continue interdisciplinary dialogue in the humanities.

“We hope this will leave Georgetown changed in a particular way,” Luciano said. “This has been a place for humanists to come together and have these conversations for the last couple of years, and I’m really hoping they continue.”

“How Should We Eat?,” the second event in this semester’s Approaching the Anthropocene programming, is an all-day symposium on food in the anthropocene that will be held this Friday, February 9, in New North 204. For more information, including speaker bios, visit the symposium website.