Tanya Schmidt ’08, who is currently a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, was recently named one of the two winners of the 2022 Anne Lake Prescott Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize by the International Spenser Society, an organization devoted to reading and studying the works 16th century English poet Edmund Spenser. According to Schmidt, this award is presented to authors of “distinguished papers on any aspect Spenser’s life and works.”
Schmidt’s advisor, Susanne Wofford, spoke highly her work before she was presented with the award. “It was truly a surreal moment for me when a Spenserian whose scholarship I greatly admire started talking about my dissertation research as ‘witty and far-reaching,’” Schmidt said. “I had to pinch myself!”
Audrey Kwong ’07, a Harker Conservatory graduate who currently works as artistic operations manager for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, has been producing virtual concerts during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I score call for cameras during the filming itself, and then work with a video editor to produce the videos themselves once we get into post-production,” she said. Her latest project is a performance of Edward Elgar’s “Sea Pictures,” Jake Heggie’s “The Work at Hand” and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” featuring mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and cellist Elizabeth Chung. It is available to purchase at the SLSO website.
The latest article by Jacob Bongers ’07, “Assembling the Dead,” was recently published in the archaeological journal “Antiquity.” The subject of the article is the 192 human spines recently uncovered in Peru’s Chincha Valley, which represent a method of treating the deceased previously unknown to the area.
The vertebrae were found attached to posts in indigenous graves called “chullpas,” and date back to the period during which colonizers from Europe had been in the region, which coincided with disease and famine killing much of the local population, said Bongers, a senior research associate at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom. Previously, he documented the looting of graves in the Chincha Valley, which was also rampant in the colonial period due to the gold and silver contained within them, as well as the colonial practice of wiping out indigenous religious practices and customs. As such, the method of placing the spines on posts, the research suggests, may have been a means to repair the damage caused to the remains by the looting.
Bongers’ research has so far garnered coverage from CNN, The Guardian, Science, Nature, India Today and dozens more outlets. He was also interviewed for the Feb. 3 episode of NPR’s “The World.” His interview starts at 39 minutes and 40 seconds.
Last week, Natasha Sarin ‘07 was featured in a piece by The New York Times, which focused on her work in President Joe Biden’s administration to track down and claim the revenue owed by tax cheats (also known as the tax gap), and how it figures into the president’s infrastructure plan.
According to the story, Sarin’s appointment indicated the importance of tax code compliance in the administration. Trained at Harvard and formerly a professor of law and finance at the University of Pennsylvania, she was hired in March by Janet Yellen, U.S. secretary of the treasury, and worked with economist (and former treasury deputy secretary during the Clinton administration) Larry Summers at Harvard to devise a way to reduce the tax gap. Their research, published in 2019, stated that the tax gap could be reduced by 15 percent by empowering the Internal Revenue Service to increase audits of the wealthy and instituting more thorough reporting requirements.
The piece also touches on Sarin’s other notable collaborations, including her work with Congressman Ro Khanna, as well as her activities and achievements as a Harker student, such as captaining the varsity basketball team and her involvement in hiring rapper Snoop Dogg for an event on youth violence.