Weaver/Nicolais Family International Travel Endowment Fund

In the fall on 2021 I studied abroad in Belfast in the north of Ireland. While abroad I received a Travel Enrichment Grant to travel to Derry and Glasgow, Scotland. Both cities are recipients of the European Capital of Culture Award. In October I traveled to Derry from Belfast by train which was about two hours each way. While in Derry I went to the Tower Museum and explored free Derry. Derry is a city rich with history of the conflict that happened here in the north and the museum exemplifies the history of conflict and the art that came out of it.

In mid-December 2021 I said goodbye to my host family, friends, and professors and traveled from Madrid to a very small area called Siurana in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia (Catalunya in Catalan and Cataluña in Spanish). The trip proved to be a spectacular celebratory end to my semester abroad on St. Lawrence’s Spain program, and allowed me to say farewell to Spain in a very special way.

While studying abroad in Spain during the spring semester of 2016 I was awarded a travel enrichment grant, thanks to the generous donation of the Weaver Family, to visit Basque Country and Catalonia. These regions are recognized as two of Spain’s historical autonomous communities due to their historical, linguistic, and cultural uniqueness that is distinct from other regions in Spain. As a result, each region has a strong sense of regional identity, which has established a long history of nationalist sentiments and independence movements that have continued into the present day.

Last semester I studied abroad in Cairns, Australia. Thanks to the enormous generosity of several St. Lawrence donors, I was also able to travel to New Zealand during my mid-semester break through a travel enrichment grant. My intended plan for New Zealand was to hike the Milford Track Walk for four days and also do other hikes in the area. The Milford Track walk ended up being far more expensive than my previous research had led me to believe and therefore I did not end up undertaking the Milford track walk. Instead I completed several related outdoor activities in New Zealand.

During my junior year here at St. Lawrence I arranged to do my Senior Year Experience research project with Dr. Susan Willson. She had been talking with a research station in Costa Rica about the possibility of using their camera trap network for a research project for the past year, and had just decided to go ahead with the project. She and another student applied for funding to travel down to the research station to experience the station first hand, and were awarded with the money to do so.

During my semester abroad in Vienna, Austria, I was fortunate enough to spend my spring break in Croatia and Montenegro. The trip was made possible through a generous travel enrichment grant from the Weaver/Nicolais Family International Travel Endowment Fund. For 10 days, I traveled down the coastline of Croatia and into Montenegro. The goal of my trip was to visit the cities once controlled by the Venetian empire, and a city that avoided total Venetian rule.

Thanks to the generosity of the Weaver/Nicolais Family while studying abroad this past fall in Chiang Mai, Thailand I was able to visit Kolkata, India and Singapore to observe British colonial architecture. I was mainly interested in looking at the physical upkeep of colonial buildings and who seemed to interact with them, from local populations to tourists. What I observed thanks to my Travel Enrichment Grant inspired me further and this semester I am pursuing a European Studies SYE on the intersection of colonial heritage buildings, their conservation and heritage tourism.

Prior to my semester abroad, I took an FYP about food writing my freshman year simply because it was a requirement. This course ended up being my favorite course at St. Lawrence, and it inspired me to research more about food inequalities and food deserts. I became interested in how healthy food accessibility varies from community to community. For my semester abroad, I received a travel grant which allowed me to travel around the entire South Island of New Zealand, researching their various methods to combat food inequalities.

Hello, my name is Evelyn MacMahon, originally of Harvard, Massachusetts. I am a member of the Class of 2019 and I will be graduating with a double major in Psychology and Art & Art History. I had the joy of studying abroad in Cortona, Italy during the Fall of 2018.

During the fall of my junior year (2018) I studied abroad in Costa Rica.  One of the most valuable aspects of my time abroad was traveling to Panama City for a long weekend.  I visited the historic neighborhood of Casco Viejo in Panama City with one of the other girls from the Costa Rica study abroad program.  Founded by Spanish colonists in the 1670s, Casco Viejo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that contains many examples of Spanish colonial architecture

I received an amazing opportunity to travel to Hamburg, Germany for five days in May of 2018. I traveled to Hamburg to work with The Peace Paper Project, learn about art therapy, and explore the city. The Peace Paper Project uses the art of making paper as a vehicle for personal expression and cultural change; it is used as a method for coping with trauma or a form of activism. My interest in this organization started my freshman year when Drew Matott, the director of the Peace Paper Project, came to St. Lawrence and conducted a workshop.

My classmate, Quinn Audsley ‘20, and I received a travel grant for the spring semester abroad in Chiang Mai, Thailand. With two weeks of break allotted to us in April, we were able to go to Northern India, completing a trek in the Western Himalayas, experiencing the city of Delhi, and engaging in person with content previously studied in Dr. Basu’s “Icons of Islamic Architecture” course.

I am a Government and Multi-Language (French, German and Italian) double-major and a European Studies and Arabic Studies double-minor. I studied abroad in Rome (Italy) during Spring 2018. I also studied abroad in Vienna (Austria), where I started my research on slavery during the Late-Roman Republic in the Roman Republic and its provinces. Due to this research in Spring 2017, I decided to narrow down my topic and study the case study of Gladiators as slaves: ‘Gladiatore: mancipia athletae?

While abroad in the United Kingdom, I was able to spend time examining what affordable housing communities are like in Edinburgh and London. Affordable housing had always been an area of significant interest for me and something I have spent a great deal researching. My research provided me with lots of statistics and figures, but data only takes you so far. Getting to see affordable communities in person in two major European cities was an incredible opportunity for me to build upon my initial research.

I had the privilege of studying abroad in Prague, Czech Republic for the Fall 2019 semester. As a history major, I chose to study in Prague for its connection to my personal family heritage – my maternal grandfather’s parents were from Czechoslovakia and immigrated to the US in the early 1900s. In Prague, I was in a homestay where my host mother taught me about Czech and Slovak cultures through food, language, and our dinner time conversations.

My name is Anna He Baker and I am in the class of 2022 with a Government and Philosophy Major and a Spanish Minor. I am from Memphis, TN, but have lived in China for 5 years. The generous travel enrichment grant that I received from the Weaver and Nicolais Family allowed me to conduct my research while studying abroad in Madrid, Spain from Fall 2019 to Spring 2020.

My name is Luiz Gomez and I am a senior Global Studies major. After my semester-long experienced in Kenya, I was fortunate to receive a Travel Grant to visit Cape Town South Africa. My interest in wanting to visit South Africa had in large part to do with my interest in the system of Apartheid which in many ways mirrors the history of America’s own racial Apartheid, the focus of my Honor Senior Thesis.

Because of the generous travel research grant I received last fall, throughout my semester abroad I had the chance to research and experience historic and modern versions of the public sphere. The concept of the public sphere, an area in which individuals can come together freely and interact, is something I have been interested in for a couple of years now. Grace Adams ‘20 and I completed our FYS with Dr. Juraj Kittler in 2017.

Because of the generosity of the Weaver/ Nicolais family I was able to travel to Southern Spain in January of 2020 in the Spring Semester to conduct research. My project was called “Who Is Climbing?/ Quién está escalando? This project was done in order for me to research who occupies the climbing sites on the Mediterranean and what infrastructure needs to be in place to encourage increased and effective climbing. I was able to spend 9 days in Costa Blanca, Spain. Seven of those days were spent outside at several different climbing sites all located on the Mediterranean Sea.