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Radcliffe Institute recognizes top three Harvard theses

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The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study awarded the Captain Jonathan Fay Prize to the graduating seniors whose theses set forth the most imaginative work and original research.

This year three Fay Prize recipients were chosen from 81 Thomas Hoopes Prize winners for outstanding scholarly work or research: mathematics concentrator Ashok Cutkosky for his thesis Polymer Simulations and DNA Topology; history and literature concentrator Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey for his thesis The “Electrified Fable”: Radio Experimentation, Interwar Social Psychology, and Imagined Invasion in the War of the Worlds; and history concentrator Laura Savarese for her thesis Slavery’s Battleground: Contesting the Status of Enslaved and Free Blacks in St. Louis, from Statehood to the Civil War.

“The work of the 2013 Fay Prize winners demonstrates the original thinking that Harvard encourages and that the Radcliffe Institute is dedicated to supporting,” said Radcliffe Institute Dean Cohen, when presenting the awards to the three Fay Prize winners. “We are honoring the distinguished work of these young minds and predict this is just the first of many remarkable achievements.”