| TWO
HAVERFORD COLLEGE SENIORS AWARDED WATSON FELLOWSHIPS
Kira Intrator ’05, of Ferney-Voltaire,
France, and Chris Kingsley ’05, of Portland, Me., have been
awarded Thomas
J. Watson Fellowships for 2005-2006. The fellowships provide
funding for one year of independent study and travel outside the
United States. Participating
institutions, of which there are 49, may nominate four candidates
each year. The most recent year in which Haverford had two Watsons
was 2001. In all, 50 college seniors across the country were chosen
for Watson Fellowships this year.
Kira Intrator will be studying indigenous
musical forms—specifically classical Islamic and Hindustani
vocal techniques—in Egypt, Turkey, and India. She wants to
incorporate these techniques with jazz singing, her main passion.
“The tones are more delicate and subtle, and singers use vocal
trills and half-notes that aren’t heard in Western music,”
she says. “It will be amazing to apply this sound to my jazz
singing.”
Intrator’s father is a jazz violinist, so the genre, she says,
“permeated every crevice of my house” growing up: “I
was singing Billie Holiday songs at age five.”
Her fascination with multicultural music was stoked during the summer
following her sophomore year, when she used a Kessinger Family Fund
grant to travel to Morocco. “I was always interested in Islam
and its culture,” she says, “not just what I read in
books, but its everyday life.” While abroad, she attended
music festivals and was awed by the blending of Moroccan music with
that of other countries such as Senegal.
During the second semester of her junior year, she took a break
from Haverford and went to Boston, where she took jazz singing lessons
at Berklee College of Music and audited a course at Harvard focusing
on ethnomusicology through Islamic music. She was shown raw footage
of Islamic music festivals and knew then and there that someday
she would witness them in person.
“Music is a way for me to discover myself, and also to delve
into another culture,” she says. “It gives me a true
taste of that way of life.”
Chris Kingsley, a Growth and Structure
of Cities major (at Bryn Mawr) will be traveling to South Africa,
India, and Hong Kong to study the public rationale for Internet
usage. Aside from Canada, Kingsley has never been outside the U.S.
Internet access is a theme Kingsley explored in his
senior thesis on “Wireless Philadelphia,” a project
being pursued by Mayor John Street’s administration. Announced
in August 2004, the initiative would provide free wireless access
for anyone within the city limits (135 square miles) within two
years. “It’s a very interesting concept because everyone
needs connectivity,” Kingsley says, “and it brings up
issues of e-government and how cities are run.”
It also brings up issues of socioeconomic disparity
and access to public resources. Kingsley took off four years before
attending Haverford and lived in Florida, North Carolina, and Chicago—and
witnessed some startlingly hollow inner-city neighborhoods. In Philadelphia,
he has been able to draw parallels to that experience. “In
Rittenhouse Square you will have people taking advantage of wireless
access,” he explains, “and in West Philly you’ll
be hard pressed in some neighborhoods to find a computer.”
Similarly, Kingsley had taken an interest in Johannesburg, where
some impressive, progressive projects are underway, as compared
to nearby Soweto, “where you’d be lucky to find running
water.”
In addition to technological disparities, Kingsley
has witnessed the poverty, despair, and racial divisiveness—as
well as the drugs and violence—that beset many inner-city
communities. At Haverford, he has found the kind of community he’d
like to explore and foster elsewhere in the world. “I just
love the public spirit of Haverford,” he says.
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