2021 Northwestern University Presidential Fellows announced

The Presidential Fellowship is the most prestigious fellowship awarded to graduate students by Northwestern University. It is awarded annually to graduate students who are nominated by their academic programs.

The 2021 Northwestern University Presidential Fellows  in Weinberg College include:

Andrea Adomako

An interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, Andrea Adomako’s work spans the fields of Black girlhood studies, gender & sexuality studies, literary criticism, and Black political thought. Her current research examines what we can all collectively learn from Black girls’ friendships through critical engagement with their lives and those writing about them. Transnational in scope, Andrea’s work analyzes figures/objects from the United States and Ghana to account for the gendered differences of girlhood and the feminist commitments literary movements were grappling with during the 1960s and 1970s. In revisiting literature between 1969 and 1976—which represents the height of the Black Arts Movement and Pan-African literary formations— Andrea examines texts by Maya Angelou, Efua Sutherland, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ama Ata Aidoo who are connected through their interpersonal diasporic friendships with one another and their authorial insistence on communicating ideas about violence and intimacy through symbols of Black girlhood. Her research reveals that the politics of friendship revolve around innovative ways of being with each other, which does not rely on punishment but rather fosters a creative interrogation of the world around us.

Andrea contextualizes the labor of friendship in the diasporic Black literary tradition to understand how Black girls have become powerful racialized, gendered, and sexualized symbols that render them as the most significant movement builders, while also being highly invisible and in crisis. Working with youth organizations such as the Chicago Freedom School and the Akoma Institute, Andrea is committed to relationship building as a political commitment and intellectual practice.

She holds a BA in Africana studies and human rights from Barnard College, as well as an MA in American studies from Purdue University.

Laura Larocca

Laura Larocca’s research focuses on understanding the recent and long-term history of Greenland’s mountain glaciers. Over the last two decades, air temperature in the Arctic has risen by more than double the global average, and consequently, most of Greenland’s ~20,000 glaciers peripheral to the Greenland Ice Sheet have retreated. Despite their importance to 21^st century sea-level rise and to freshwater resources, little is known about their history, pre the satellite era. More knowledge of past glacier change will allow for improved estimates of their sensitivity to temperature change, including sustained warming like that predicted for the future. To address this knowledge gap, Laura uses two complementary approaches. Her first project documents glacier length change over the last ~120 years using a combination of early 20^th century aerial photographs from Danish mapping expeditions of Greenland, declassified Cold War-era spy satellite imagery, and imagery from modern satellites. Combined, these datasets allow her to distinguish how unusual 21^st-century retreat rates are in the context of the past ~120 years, and to assess when southern Greenland’s glaciers will likely disappear in the future.

Laura’s second project evaluates glacier fluctuations over the Holocene (the geologic epoch spanning the past ~10,000 years) using lake sediment records. In 2018, she led an expedition to collect sediment cores from three lakes in South Greenland, which currently have glaciers in their watersheds. Her analyses revealed that glaciers in southern Greenland melted away later in the Holocene than those in northern Greenland, supporting the hypothesis that the timing of maximum Holocene warmth varied spatially across Greenland. Laura holds an MS in earth and atmospheric science from City College of the City University of New York and a BFA from New York University. She is committed to creative communication of climate science to the broader public and participation in K-12 outreach. View her research website.

The fellows were chosen for their demonstrated record of outstanding academic achievement, promise as scholars, teachers, and researchers, and the ability to communicate the significance and impact of their research to a broad academic audience.

As Presidential Fellows, these recipients will take on a leadership role in the Society of Fellows. The fellows are from a range of backgrounds and perspectives and will represent their respective disciplines and the broader graduate community in gatherings and discussions throughout the year. Together, they enhance the interdisciplinary vibrancy of the University.