Friday, April 03, 2009

student will explore eastern Sephardim

I'm pleased to announce that Emma Morgenstern has won the Terry B. Heled Travel & Research Grant at the Kelly Writers House. We received dozens of fine applications.

Emma (class of 2010) is majoring in Linguistics. She has been published in The Boston Globe Magazine and Penn's own F-Word. Emma is also founder and editor-in-chief of Penn Appetit, Penn's first-ever and only student-run and -written magazine of food writing. Emma has also participated in the Penn Reading Initiative at Huey Elementary School.

Enabled by this grant, Emma will travel to Greece and Turkey to research and conduct interviews with the Jews of Thessaloniki and Istanbul, to learn about their culture, customs and linguistic behavior. She hopes to learn how being the member of a religious and ethnic minority affects attitudes toward religious, ethnic, and linguistic heritage. She will present her writing next fall at the Writers House.

As a way of memorializing her mother, Terry B. Heled, and of honoring the students of her alma mater in gratitude for the encouragement her own research and writing received while she was at Penn, Mali Heled Kinberg (C'95) has created this endowed fund at the Kelly Writers House that, each summer, will enable a student to travel for the purpose of conducting the research that will lead to a significant writing project.

For more about the Heled Grant, see:

writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/awards/heled.