Lederman '08 wins Keasbey prize

Harvey Lederman ’08, a classics major and past recipient of the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence and the Haarlow Prize for coursework in humanistic studies, is the University’s sole recipient of a 2008 Keasbey Scholarship. The award enables its recipient to undertake two years of study at one of four British universities.

Lederman, a New York City native, has elected to attend the University of Cambridge for two years to pursue a second undergraduate degree in classics.

Lederman, who spent his sophomore year at Oxford, said that he was “taken by [the British] system” of higher education. “I’ve always been motivated by academic work and have always felt like I’ve been impeded by time in the classroom. I was liberated by being able to go off and read and learn a little bit more about the big-picture view.”

In addition to his work in the classics department, Lederman also studied Chinese, though he’s not sure how these two areas of interest will eventually connect. “I’m a little worried because I find that often those studies which are done across disciplines neglect one side or the other,” he said. “At some point, I hope to find a way ... to do both separately.”

Lederman’s varied interests have taken him around the world. Over the last three years, he has studied abroad in England, China and Greece and interned as a literature teacher at the only free high school in Sierra Leone.

“They certainly have been an important part of my Princeton experience,” Lederman said of his travels. “I think it’s so important to be abroad and have different kinds of experiences.”

Lederman plans to spend the remainder of the year finishing his senior thesis, which will analyze grammatical subordination in the victory odes of the Greek poet Pindar. Once in England, though, Lederman said he is looking forward to taking different types of classes from those offered in American universities.

“We take a lot of primary-text classes,” he said of the courses offered at Princeton. “I haven’t really taken classes in reading how the 17th-century [scholars] read Greek.”

Classics professor Andrew Feldherr ’85, who taught Lederman, lauded him for his achievements. “Even among the many extraordinary students I have taught in the Classics Department here, Harvey stands out for the extraordinary range of his interests and for his passionate commitment to ideas,” he said in an e-mail.

Fellow classics professor Froma Zeitlin echoed her colleague’s sentiments. “He has a wonderful sense of intellectual curiosity,” she said. “He has uncanny intelligence. He was willing to take risks to pursue his ideas. He’s an explorer, and he wants to confront the texts that he reads with new eyes.”

In 1953, Philadelphia heiress Marguerite Keasbey, with the assistance of University President Harold Dodds GS 1914, established a foundation to award scholarships to educate students through the British educational system.

Though students in the United Kingdom receive most Keasbey scholarships, four are given each year to American undergraduates who want to pursue further studies at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh or Wales at Aberystwyth.

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Twelve colleges and universities, including Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale, are eligible to put forth candidates on a rotating, three-year cycle.

Each year four institutions nominate three graduating seniors, who are then invited to the foundation’s Philadelphia headquarters for personal interviews.