Campus & Community

Junior 24 elected to Phi Beta Kappa

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On May 15, 2003, 24 Harvard College juniors will be inducted into Alpha Iota of Massachusetts, the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. The juniors, who were elected to the undergraduate honor society on April 11, will participate in a dinner ceremony confirming their membership in the 223-year-old chapter.

The keynote speaker at the dinner will be Irene Winter, the William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts. Winter, who was one of the curators of the “Treasures of the Tombs of Ur” exhibit at the Fogg Museum last year, will speak about her work on the antiquities of Mesopotamia and the recent looting of the Baghdad Museum, which caused the loss and destruction of irreplaceable artifacts going back many thousands of years.

In a recent letter to the Washington Post, Winter wrote that “the thousands of looted and damaged works constitute a priceless record of human history. They represent ‘our’ heritage, to the extent that civilization as we know it began in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, and to the extent that events recorded in the Old Testament, sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, are deeply rooted in Mesopotamia.”

In the letter, Winter recommended a program of cooperation among Interpol, UNESCO, the U.S. State Department’s Art Theft Program, and the Iraqi Department of Antiquities to recover as many of the objects as possible.

The following juniors, including their concentrations and Houses, will be inducted:

John Leonard Beshears, economics, Leverett; Harold Michael Birnbaum, Slavic, Eliot; Stephanie Erin Brewer, psychology, Lowell; Michael Richard Callahan, music, Adams; Ruth Anne Craig, religion, Eliot; Rebecca Nichole Esther Dizon-Ross, economics, Quincy; Rebecca Esther Doran, East Asian studies, Kirkland; Winnie Fung, applied math, Mather; Andrew Goldstone, physics, Adams; Jennifer Yuan Hsiao, social studies, Adams; Andrew Jay Kallem, economics, Eliot; Judd Benjamin Kessler, economics, Adams; Andrew Che-yu Lin, biology, Adams; Nilah Monnier, biochemical sciences, Mather; Paul Frederick Niehaus, applied math, Dunster; Matthew Neal Ocheltree, English, Pforzheimer; Bryan Jeffrey Parno, computer science, Lowell; Richard Macdonald Re, social studies, Quincy; Saurabh Hemant Sanghvi, computer science, Adams; Ganesh Narain Sitaraman, government, Currier; Jordan Wyatt Thomas, physics, Quincy; Daniel Arthur Tinkoff, engineering sciences, Leverett; Evan Charles Tschirhart, history, Eliot; and Rachael Anne Wagner, economics and anthropology, Cabot.