Class of 2026 Bowden fellows preview their humanities projects

10/6/2026

The 10th anniversary class of Dan Leslie Bowden Fellows in the Humanities provided a preview of their summer research projects during an upper school assembly in the Lewis Family Auditorium on October 6. Eight seniors shared updates on their work exploring a range of topics in the humanities. The Bowden fellows, Matilda Barrack '27, Ava Crowley '27, Isla Dua '27, Gabrielle Heckler '27, Valentina Pombo '27, Chloe Steinberg '27, Reisha Yavagal '27 and Myla Zuckerman '27, are preparing to unveil their completed work on Bowden Fellows Gallery Night on December 7 at the upper school.

The fellows were selected last spring after submitting their research plans to a committee of humanities faculty, and they have since worked under the direction of RE’s Chief of Innovation & Strategic Programming John A. King Jr. The fellowship was created in 2015 from a founding donation by Jeffrey Miller '79 in honor of late English teacher Dan Leslie Bowden, who taught and worked at Ransom Everglades for more than 60 years.

Enjoy learning more about the Bowden fellows humanities explorations:

Between Belief and Fiction: The Relational Expression and Experience of Belief
Reisha Yavagal '27

My research explores the question: How does the portrayal of relationships between believers and non-believers in 19th-century European fiction reveal the human experience and expression of belief? Answering the question of what it means to be human, I argue that belief is the most fundamental aspect of the human experience. Religious and non-religious, belief is a part of everyday life. My project seeks to understand how different types of beliefs are universally experienced and expressed through fiction. Through literary theory, I argue that fiction is one of the most vulnerable ways of attaining truth through authors’ imaginative humans and societies. To study these relationships, I read four fiction novels: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Man Who Was Thursday: The Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton, and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. In each novel, despite their different genres, I found that the most expressive form of belief was through relationships involving a non-believer and a believer, especially through their conversations. Even though belief is extremely personal, it isn’t formed and grown in isolation. The relational expression of beliefs allows them to change, grow, and strengthen themselves. I argue that to be human isn't to be religious or non-religious, but to experience our own beliefs through human relationships.

More Than Money: Human Experience and Meaning During Brazil’s Hyperinflation
Valentina Pombo '27

Project Location: São Paulo, Brazil

How did Brazil's period of hyperinflation in São Paulo complicate humans' relationships with each other, mundane objects and routines? From 1980 to 1994, Brazilians endured hyperinflation caused by several years of deficit and several failed stabilization plans. It was only in 1994, with the implementation of the Plano Real, that Brazilians were able to truly comprehend the value that their currency held. How did ordinary people navigate daily life when money ceased to function reliably as a tool for planning, trust and value? First, I conducted oral interviews with several Brazilians who experienced the crisis first-hand. With a combination of selected interviewees and natural street-style conversations, I was able to collect experiences from different socioeconomic backgrounds, ages, jobs, responsibilities and personal values. Through this, I was able to understand the individual discrepancies within a shared experience. Second, my archival work led me to conclude that when money stopped functioning reliably, people did not lose their humanity. Instead, the conditions of everyday life revealed what being human actually depended on. When faced with instability, people relied less on abstract systems and more on relationships, memory and moral judgment to navigate daily decisions. Similar to a language, money keeps us in a shared system of meaning, without having to think about the countless small agreements that hold that system up. When hyperinflation broke down that structure it revealed the systems that humans could understand in the midst of uncertainty: routines and relationships.

Facing Loss, Finding Connection: The Experience of Teenage Volunteers in Hospice Care

Myla Zuckerman '27

My Bowden Fellowship project examines how volunteering with hospice patients shapes empathy development in teenage volunteers. As a hospice volunteer, I became curious about how sustained exposure to death and dying affects the way teens relate to others, and whether that experience can be intentionally cultivated rather than left to chance. To investigate this, I conducted nine interviews with teen hospice volunteers alongside three interviews with professionals in the field, Dr. Alicia Benner, Lisa Alexander and Dr. Brian Pachter, to understand both the lived experience of young volunteers and the clinical perspective on grief and end-of-life care.

I supplemented these interviews with research into foundational texts on death and dying, including Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying and Kessler's Finding Meaning, using qualitative coding and cross-interview thematic synthesis to identify patterns in how empathy is built through this kind of service. Based on this research, I developed a three-stage Understanding by Design instructional framework to prepare and support teen volunteers before they begin hospice work, including a pre-volunteering video training module. My goal is to translate what I learned into a replicable model that other schools and volunteer programs can use to help teens engage with mortality and human connection in a way that builds lasting empathy rather than avoidance.

Never Freed, Nor Forgotten: An exploration of the lives of the 982 refugees residing in Fort Ontario during the Holocaust

Gabrielle Heckler '27

Project Location: Washington, D.C., Silver Spring, Md., Oswego, N.Y.

I am conducting a research project on the experiences of the Jewish refugees who lived at the United States’ only official World War II refugee shelter, Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York, often referred to as “Safe Haven.” I am examining how life at Fort Ontario from 1944 to 1946 shaped the refugees’ religious observance during, and sequentially after, the Holocaust. I traveled to Oswego to conduct archival research and spoke with individuals connected to the shelter. I hoped to better understand how former residents reflected on this experience and how it influenced their lives in the years that followed. Fort Ontario is often overlooked in discussions of the United States’ role in World War II. While existing scholarship tends to focus on immigration policy and diplomatic symbolism surrounding the “Token Shipment” of refugees, I am curious about another question: In what ways did Jewish refugees' experience at Fort Ontario shape the enduring nature of their religious observance? As part of this research, I am developing a documentary-style film about the events at Fort Ontario between 1944 and 1946, to convey this story to as many people as possible.

Words for the Unknown: How Languages Name Fate, Luck, and Hope
Isla Dua '27

his project is built around the belief that uncertainty about the future is a fundamental condition of human experience, and that everyone carries a perspective about the future, whether or not they know it. People have built words to steady themselves inside the unknown. I am studying seven of those words, drawn from seven cultures, each naming some version of luck, hope or fate. For each I trace the etymology and historical development through primary texts and scholarship, then look at how the word lives in proverbs, literature, prayer and ordinary speech. What this has shown me is that from one shared condition, uncertainty, each culture created its own unique coping mechanism and described it in language. Some imagine the unknown as something earned, others as something already scripted, others as something encountered by accident and turned into a gift.

I am working on a poetry collection, one poem for each word. Poetry is a way of thinking that allows complexity; it leaves room for feeling and uncertainty and makes connections analysis can't see. It also mirrors what I'm studying, since every one of these cultures took what could not be fully known and made something out of it, and writing a poem for each word lets me do that work rather than describe it from outside. What I want the poems to give other people is a version of the research they can feel. Uncertainty is inevitable, but the way we meet it is not fixed, and learning how other traditions name fate, luck and hope offers new ways of thinking about agency, surrender, responsibility, patience, and surprise. Through my project, I am learning how the humanities train us to see the shared instinct underneath our different expressions of it.

Is Reconciliation Possible?

The Stolen Generations and Australia’s Responsibility for Historical Injustice

Matilda Barrack '27

Project Location: Sydney and Canberra, Australia

What prevents meaningful reconciliation between Aboriginal Australians and the broader Australian public? How can shifting perspectives toward greater nuance build a more united Australia? For over a century, the Australian government forcibly removed thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander children from their families as part of a government-sponsored effort to assimilate them. This is the Stolen Generations. Since then, the Australian government has tried to reconcile, with the 2008 National Apology and more Indigenous recognition, but reconciliation still remains deeply contested. Meaningful reconciliation isn't solely dependent on constitutional reform and national responsibility; instead, reconciliation is fostered when we, as unique individuals, become willing to move beyond our own rigid narratives, embrace nuance and confusion, and actively try to move beyond our own layers of understanding.

To explore this, I travelled through Sydney and Canberra, interviewing Indigenous survivors of the Stolen Generations, historians, journalists, politicians, legal scholars and community leaders. I visited various museums, the National Archives and Aboriginal heritage organizations to understand how this history is preserved, documented, and engaged. I explored these topics with individuals who held vastly different views on the subject of reconciliation and personal/national responsibility.

Alongside these historical and contemporary perspectives, I studied political theories of collective responsibility and governmental obligations. Through this lens, I was able to understand a framework to evaluate what meaningful reconciliation looks like to different people and how injustice affects communities long after the event.

I found that the greatest obstacle to reconciliation wasn't the lack of willingness to reconcile, but rather the lack of willingness to deeply interact with histories and experiences vastly different from one's own. I myself felt violently tossed between perspectives, I realized that in each conversation I was putting myself in their narrow worldview. This work forced me to tackle viewpoints I wouldn't normally explore. Australians must recognize that history, identity and responsibility are experienced differently across communities. In this sense, reconciliation is not about achieving unanimous agreement on the past, but about cultivating a country where people are willing to accept discomfort to understand another reality.

From Broadway to Atlanta: Theater as a Lens on Jewish Cultural Memory
Chloe Steinberg '27

Project Location: New York, N.Y. and Atlanta, Ga.

How does theater construct Jewish cultural memory, and what happens to that memory when a staged narrative is encountered within the Jewish community it represents?

Using the musical Parade and the Leo Frank case as a central case study, I examine how theater can introduce audiences to histories that might otherwise disappear from public memory, and how those stories take on new meaning when encountered by communities with their own connections to the past. Through archival research, watching musicals/plays, interviews with members of the theater and Jewish communities, and site-based research in New York and Atlanta, I explore how historical stories are transformed from records and events into shared experiences. Ultimately, my project asks what theater can do as a tool for remembering, and how that act of remembering can create space for action.

Stories That Heal: How Survivor-Led Children’s Literature Gives Pediatric Cancer a Voice
Ava Crowley '27
How does survivor-led children’s literature center the voices of pediatric cancer patients and serve as a tool for comfort, healing, and preparation? This question explores the need for children’s books that reflect the experiences of pediatric cancer patients through the perspective of someone who has lived through it. I researched the effectiveness of bibliotherapy – a therapeutic process of reading aloud books – to support pediatric patients’ physical, mental and overall well-being in children’s hospitals. I am developing a written reflection of my findings in the style of an essay, and writing an original children’s read-aloud book thoughtfully created from my own experience as a stage 4 neuroblastoma cancer survivor, using a relatable and comforting narrative to help children feel understood and prepared.

Back

RE founder Paul Ransom, circa 1903

News Detail

Class of 2026 Bowden fellows preview their humanities projects

Middle School

Upper School

Accreditations and Memberships