New Fellows

The magazine’s Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellows for the 2017-2018 academic year will be Natasha Lasky ’19 and Tawanda Mulalu ’20. The fellows join the editorial staff and contribute to the magazine during the year, writing the “Undergraduate” column and reporting for both the print publication and harvardmagazine.com, among other responsibilities.

Lasky, of Menlo Park, California, and Lowell House, is a junior concentrating in history and literature, with a secondary in visual and environmental studies; she has written, directed, produced, and edited several short films. Her extracurricular commitments include serving as features editor at The Harvard Advocate, DJ-ing for WHRB, and tutoring at the Harvard College Writing Center. This past summer she improved her Spanish language skills and studied Argentine literature in Buenos Aires.

Mulalu, of Gaborone, Botswana, and Adams House, is a sophomore contemplating a joint concentration in physics and philosophy. A writer for The Harvard Advocate’s features board, he spent much of the summer as a Houghton Library undergraduate fellow, “digging around for old manuscripts about the history and physics of gravity” as sources for a future poetry collection; he also spent one week in China teaching a seminar on “Africa, America; Hip-Hop, Poetry” through the Harvard Summit for Young Leaders in China program. (He and a friend last year formed their own hip-hop group, Basimane—“boys” in his native Setswana—and have performed at colleges in the Boston area.)

The fellowships are supported by Jonathan J. Ledecky ’79, M.B.A. ’83, and named in honor of his mother. For updates on past Ledecky Fellows and links to their work, see http://harvardmagazine.com/donate/special-gifts/ledecky [5].