The Burch Fellows Program

Ryan Dowdy is a Senior Honors English major, Music and Creative Writing minor from Auburn, Alabama. As a songwriter and poet working on his honors thesis, he performs with local group Lafcadio around the Triangle Area. With a background in the confluence of music and poetry, he used the Burch Fellowship to study the history and performance of the Irish rebel ballad, a complex and dynamic musical idiom that has generated songs throughout the history of conflict in Ireland, from the Rebellion of 1641 to the Civil War of 1922 and through the Hunger Strike of 1981. He began in County Donegal by engaging in Irish language immersion to further his ability to interpret old rebel ballads that remained outside the popular idiom. Simultaneously learning Irish language during the day and traditional Irish ballads at night from some of Donegal’s best musicians, he spent a month in Glencolumbkille, Co. Donegal, focusing on the music that he played for the rest of his trip in Ireland. He then traveled to Falls Road, Belfast, one of the centers of the conflict during the Troubles, meeting with rebels who spent much of their lives in Long Kesh Prison. He then traveled to Galway to further his studies at the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI Galway, meeting with Dr Louis de Paor, Director of the centre. He also took part in the Galway Arts Festival, playing ballads in the street as part of the collection of street performers. Finally, he traveled to Dublin and assembled Irish-language rebel ballads from the National Library of Ireland and the Irish Traditional Music Archive. Ryan chronicled his studies and collection of ballads for donation to Wilson Library, and will record an album of rebel ballads with help from David van Dokkum, a local recording engineer and award-winning sound artist. Ryan is also preparing a performance of the music at Graham Memorial in Spring 2010.

Anna Claire Eddington is a junior journalism and geography major  from Baton Rouge, Louisiana with a strong interest in the international media. With her Burch Fellowship, Anna Claire traveled to South Africa to study the role of females in the news media. Her major work consisted of interning with a magazine, a radio station and newspaper in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and she also participated in and spoke at a conference in Durban. She worked with experts on media law, gender discrimination, and media production throughout the country and had several stories published for the Cape Argus newspaper. While she intended to find similarities between South African and the United Sated on the struggle for equality with women in the media, her interviews and experiences with prominent members of the South African media were insightful in a different manner. Women, specifically black women, in South African news media have more than just a head start in the news industry these days- men, specifically white men, aren’t even allowed to run the same race! While the vast majority of people she met were well-educated and fully deserving of their position, women do not, in fact, struggle to hold the same jobs. She found it absolutely fascinating, though, that although females in the media are becoming empowered and equal in the job market, they continue to portray airbrushed images of thin, blonde women as the ideal. She hated the stereotype, but loved every second of learning. Her experience was life changing. Aside from realizing that nothing is as much fun as seeing her name in the byline, Anna Claire made phenomenal contacts in the news industry and one day hopes to live permanently in Cape Town. She is now in the process of designing a multimedia presentation and website to both commemorate her experience and serve as a networking service for all members of the internationally-minded UNC community.

Victoria Facelli used conferences and festivals throughout The Balkans, Denmark and Germany as field sites to examine both gender performance as art (e.g. drag, theater, music, fashion) and as life (the everyday performance of gender). She examined the word queer as an identity category, a political statement, and a verb through ethnography. In particular, she was able to talk to the Queer Beograd collective from Serbia about their strategic use of this term and what that means for a global queer community. Victoria conducted interviews as she traveled to get a sense of not only what these performances are doing but who the performers are. Her work took her to Performance Studies International, a scholarly conference where she worked with researchers in her field and inquired as to how they are engaging performance as communication. In Slovenia she wrote and performed an hour long drag musical in a local Cafe to show solidarity in the face of recent hate attacks. In Denmark, Victoria attended the Copenhagen Queer Festival where she taught feminine gender performativities through dance classes and had many in depth discussions about personal and political identities with people from 30 countries. Her final stop took her to Berlin where she spent time doing interviews with well known performers and attending their performance. She even got to do some performing herself in what is becoming more and more the global epicenter of performance art and drag. Victoria is now working on her thesis performance about her travels this summer and her life as a high femme performer in this fall's solo performance festival: The Solo Takes On. The Cabaret stars six actresses as Victoria and will be presented to the public in November 2009.

Taylor Jo Isenberg is a senior Peace, War, and Defense and International Studies major from Mooresville, North Carolina. Taylor used her Burch Fellowship to travel to Jerusalem, Israel to volunteer and examine the Domari community and its’ development in the city of Jerusalem. The Doms are an economically, socially, and culturally marginalized group, struggling to establish equality and identity among their Palestinian and Israeli neighbors, while overcoming the entrenched problems confronting the community internally. For her volunteer work, Taylor taught English to children at the Domari Society for the Gypsies of Jerusalem, and assisted Amoun Sleem, a woman who has become a leader by advancing the development of the community while working to preserve their quickly disappearing cultural uniqueness. For the second part of her fellowship, Taylor conducted interviews with members of the community, those who had worked closely with it, and professional experts to explore the Doms in the wider societal construct of Jerusalem, a unique and coveted city defined by years of division, conflict, and international attention. The experience gave Taylor an opportunity to explore the city of Jerusalem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a unique perspective, while witnessing how the triadic relationship between discrimination, modernization, and cultural identity have effected this complex and largely-unexplored community.

Jesalyn Keziah used her Burch Fellowship to various regions over both islands of New Zealand, studying Beekeeping, Biosecurity, and the Therapeutic and Medicinal Properties of Manuka Honey. Along with attending various Beekeeping conferences, both regional and national, she worked with the President of New Zealand's National Beekeeping Association, the Honey Bee Research Team of New Zealand's Plant and Food Research Institute, the researchers at Waikato University's Honey Research Unit, queenbreeders, biologists, ecologists, nutritionists, policy writers, and both commercial and hobby beekeepers around the country. She studied the practice of beekeeping as well as the policy behind ecological biosecurity, pesticide and agrochemical issues with relation to honeybee disease and death, organic ways to remedy common bee diseases, and the factors contributing to and issues arising from the worldwide phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder. In her work with Honey, Jesalyn explored the thousands of years of honey's use in medecine, along with the most cutting edge research on the antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, antioxidant, and antimicrobial properties of honey...especially New Zealand's world famous Manuka Honey. With this background, Jesalyn wishes to pursue further education in Ecology and Environmental Health and further research in honey and honeybee related fields. She plans to be a hobbyist beekeeper for the rest of her life.