NES held its 2014 Class Day Reception on June 2 in 1915 Hall. At the reception, the Department and Program presented this year’s prize winners and announced departmental honors. Nadirah Mansour received Highest Honors and also won the Bayard and Cleveland Dodge Memorial Thesis Prize for her senior thesis, “From Nationalism to Public Piety: The Faces of Islamic Religious Authority in the Palestinian Context (1929–1935, 1951–1967).” Quinton Beck and Eleanor Wright both earned High Honors and were elected to Princeton’s chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Beck also won the T. Cuyler Young Award for Iranian Studies for his thesis, “Soviet Language Policy: Learning from the Case of Tajikistan,” while Wright was awarded the Ertegün Foundation Thesis Prize for best senior thesis in Ottoman, Turkish, or Turkic Studies for her thesis, “Mischief in Istanbul: Giovanni Scognamillo and Turkish Horror Fiction.” Ruwa Alhayek, Maria Nelson, and Colin Valentine all received Honors. Valarie Hansen (WWS) won the NES Senior Thesis Prize for her thesis, “The Effect of State Killing of Civilians on Anti-State Violence: Case Studies of Syria & Nigeria.” Conor Dube was awarded the F. O. Kelsey Prize for best second term junior paper for his JP, “A Crime Against Culture”: Iconoclasm in Afghanistan and Mali.” Joseph Tobin and Eleanor Wright shared the Eliot Kalmbach ’09 Memorial Award for undergraduate travel and research to Turkey or other Turkic lands. Daniel Stolz won the Bayard and Cleveland Dodge Memorial Prize for Ph.D. Dissertation for his dissertation, “The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Authority, and Cultures of Astronomy in Late Ottoman Egypt.”

Prior to Class Day, it was announced that Quinton Beck and Thomas Ledford ’13 had been awarded 2014–15 Fulbright scholarships.