Vassar Ford Scholars Program Nourishes Rich Student-Faculty Collaboration

“The collaborative nature of the Ford Scholars Program allows for a rich educational experience and strengthened relationships between faculty and students,” said Associate Professor of Economics Alicia Atwood, who serves as Ford Scholars Program Director. “Having a hands-on opportunity to work on these projects allows students to better understand the day-to-day aspects of research and teaching, which allows them to make more informed decisions about paths beyond their time at Vassar. A program like Ford says Vassar values investment in our students beyond their time on campus.”

The scholars presented their research at a symposium on September 16. Read on for a small sampling of this year’s Ford projects.

Taking a Fresh Look at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center’s Hudson River School Paintings

For the past several years, curators at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center have been working on a reinstallation of the campus museum’s historic collection of Hudson River School paintings with an eye toward developing new strategies for display and recontextualization that reflect modern insights and values. Ford Scholars have been an important part of the process, said Ian Shelley ’22, Loeb Collections Curatorial Fellow. “We’ve worked with students in varying capacities to create small exhibitions that sort of test out various pieces of that reinstallation,” said Shelley, who supervised this year’s Ford Scholar at The Loeb, Beatrix Bagin ’27.

Bagin was tasked with creating an exhibition that centered on Poughkeepsie, but was given free rein to determine the direction and focus. Within six weeks, she had devised Common Ground: Art and Infrastructure in Poughkeepsie, currently on view at The Loeb until February 14, 2027. “Bea will be modest about this, but it was a really impressive effort,” said Shelley.

Bagin, who began working at The Loeb as a first-year student, said her background as an urban planning major led her to focus on infrastructure as a theme for the exhibition. “All of the pieces kind of paint this story of how infrastructure in Poughkeepsie has contributed to the identity of the city,” she said. Her research took her from Vassar’s own online databases to the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park to learn about New Deal murals to the home of local artist Emilie Houssart, who reprinted photos that originally appeared in the Poughkeepsie Journal relating to the destruction of various neighborhoods as part of urban renewal projects in the city. “I went to her house and talked to her about her process, and that was really a moment where I was like, ‘wow, I’m in the weeds here, I’m in the thick of it!’” Bagin recalled.

Not only did her Ford summer allow her to pursue “an idea that I was really interested in and passionate about,” but it also gave her valuable work experience. “It gave me all these solid skills that I can put on my resume and say, ‘I did this research. I looked through the collection and found these pieces. I was able to learn how to make a checklist and write wall text, and build relationships with artists,’” she said. “Those are all solid skills that I see being really helpful in my future endeavors.”

Analyzing Warrior Diaries of 16th-Century Japan

Ford Scholar Hodaka Maeda ’28, an English major from Anchorage, Ak, spent the summer under the guidance of Assistant Professor of Japanese Pier Carlo Tommasi immersed in two fascinating diaries written by mid-ranking samurai in late medieval Japan. The originals are housed in two separate Japanese universities that have made them available online, also providing modern Japanese translations. But no English translations exist. “I think my Japanese abilities increased a lot by reading through these diaries,” Maeda said.

The documents include descriptions of the warriors’ routine duties, messages they have received, and even poems and jokes. “My main focus is the comparison of the two diaries and how differently the two samurai try to express themselves in their writing—and, because they’re located in two very different parts of Japan, how their surroundings, the people around them, and some of the cultural differences are affecting how they write and how they perceive the things that are happening,” said Maeda.

Tommasi said the work he and Maeda did this summer is part of a larger book project he is engaged in tentatively titled Writing Warriors: Literary Techniques of the Self in Medieval Japan. “I’m interested in all kinds of writing practices that have to do with self-expression,” he said. “Hodaka helped me collect information and then we tried to make sense of it together.” Because the material in the diaries can be subject to different interpretations, Tommasi was particularly interested in Maeda’s perspective. “I really wanted to have another pair of eyes to look at these materials and learn from a completely different point of view,” Tommasi said, “and that’s exactly what Hodaka offered me—a fresh perspective.” While reading Maeda’s final summation of her summer research, Tommasi noted, “I was kind of surprised to see the level of attention that she brought to the table, for example, in the ways these warriors structured their diary entries.”

Tommasi and Maeda plan to continue studying the diaries together throughout the Fall Semester. “It’s really a treasure trove of information that sheds light on the everyday life of these people, and there’s so much that is still waiting to be tackled from a scholarly perspective,” Tommasi said. “Being able to do so under the auspices of the Ford Scholars program is really a treat and is one of the great things that Vassar makes possible.”

Can the Arms Industry Be Held Accountable for Its Impact on Children?

In recent years, children have faced increasingly devastating consequences from war, as explosive weapons destroy not only lives and livelihoods but also the homes, schools, and hospitals on which civilian survivors depend. Is there any way to turn the tide on this?

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies Tracey Holland thinks so. With a combined team of Vassar Ford Scholars and her students at Columbia University, where she is also an adjunct professor, Holland has been seeking ways to hold weapons manufacturers responsible for the impact of their products by examining their adherence to United Nations Guiding Principles on Businesses and Human Rights.

In recent years, children have faced increasingly devastating consequences from war, as explosive weapons destroy not only lives and livelihoods but also the homes, schools, and hospitals on which civilian survivors depend. Is there any way to turn the tide on this?

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies Tracey Holland thinks so. With a combined team of Vassar Ford Scholars and her students at Columbia University, where she is also an adjunct professor, Holland has been seeking ways to hold weapons manufacturers responsible for the impact of their products by examining their adherence to United Nations Guiding Principles on Businesses and Human Rights.

The UN guiding principles require that companies undertake a “human rights due diligence” (HRDD) process to assess their impacts on human rights and mitigate harm. For American companies, compliance is essentially voluntary. Yet it offers a lens through which to view how seriously individual companies take protection of children—information that, if eventually made public in an easy-to-understand ranking system, could affect investors’ decisions and therefore influence their behavior, explains Ford Scholar Max Saran ’27, who spent his summer evaluating the stated HRDD policies of 100 arms manufacturers and tracing their impact.

“You might have a company that has a seemingly robust HRDD process,” said Saran. “They even have a section [on a company website or in an annual report] where they say, ‘We monitor our customers for human rights violations,’ but then the company seems to be having active relationships with customers that appear to be in violation of human rights.”

Saran said his experience as a Ford Scholar allowed him to see how ideals play out in the real world. “I knew about international human rights as a concept, but I never really thought about it in practice,” he said. “You know, who is responsible for them, where do they come from? Does everyone have to follow them? How does it work, really?”

Have Changing Immigration Patterns Affected the Kinds of Laws Passed by U.S. States?

Over the past 20 years, the foreign-born population in the United States has increased by more than 50 percent and has become much more diverse. Has this impacted the type of legislation passed at the state level? This is the question Ford Scholar Jasper Selwood ’27 examined with Sarah Pearlman, Professor of Economics and Director of Latin American and Latinx Studies.

“I found the question really interesting, because I’m an economics major, but I’m also really interested in politics,” said Selwood. “And, obviously, immigration is a really highly debated topic that’s kind of on everybody’s minds these days.”

“States don’t have decision-making authority about who can enter the U.S., who can work in the U.S., any of those things,” explained Pearlman, “but they do have decisions over things like who gets a driver’s license and who qualifies for in-state tuition, and so that’s where you’ve seen a lot of action.”

Using a database maintained by the National Council of State Legislatures, the pair attempted to examine all immigrant-related laws passed by every state over the past 15 years, and to categorize whether each law was positive or negative towards immigrants.

“That ended up being way more difficult than I imagined,” said Selwood. “They do so many different things. And honestly, it can be hard to tell, just reading a law, whether it’s actually pro-immigrant or anti-immigrant.”

Selwood and Pearlman tried to enlist the help of the AI chatbot Claude, but found that it was no better at categorizing laws than they were.

In the end, said Pearlman, “We came to this realization that it might be more informative to know much more about one state and to carefully map different districts and different counties.” Still, she said, even if they decided the project should be reframed for next year’s Ford Scholar, it taught them both a lot.

“I think it was really fantastic because there were a range of things that Jasper got to learn and be exposed to—not just data, but also using AI to create data through textual analysis, which is not something that I regularly do,” said Pearlman. “So we both learned through this process.”

Selwood agreed. “I think I learned some really valuable skills in data analysis that could be applied to a lot of different things, so I’m very grateful for that,” he said.