The Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs would like to acknowledge Isaak Spain and Sydney-Paige Patterson as the recipients of the 2020-2021 Won-Joon Yoon Scholarship.
The scholarship was established in 1999 by former IU President Myles Brand to honor the memory of Yoon, an IU graduate student from South Korea who was killed in 1999. The scholarship is awarded to IU Bloomington students whose academic, professional, and personal accomplishments and goals exhibit tolerance, understanding, and commitment to service.
We will like to give special thanks to the members of the Won-Joon Yoon Scholarship Committee:
- Joan Linton – Associate Professor, Department of English
- Maria Hamilton-Abegunde – Director, The Graduate Mentoring Center & Visiting Lecturer – African American and African Diaspora Studies
- Laura Plummer – Director, Scholarly Writing Program
- Melanie Castillo-Cullather – Director, Asian Culture Center
- Ochmaa Escue – Director, OVPDEMA Overseas Studies and Scholarship Program
Isaak Spain is a junior at Indiana University Bloomington studying Linguistics and Central Eurasian Studies. He is a member of the Hutton Honors College, Phi Eta Sigma, and the Turkish Flagship Program.
According to one of his recommenders, Isaak understands the importance of personal relationships and local engagement and how they strengthen ties between different people. Isaak believes the more people in different countries that know about each other and each other’s cultures, the stronger their relationships can be and, therefore, the stronger their governmental relations can be. Due to his appetite for making new connections and desire to spread tolerance and understanding of other cultures through radio media, he started the Baku Boi Broadcast on WIUX B-side internet radio. The Baku Boi introduces music from around the world to its audience. With the aid of the Won-Joon Yoon scholarship, he will spend his capstone year in Azerbaijani hopes to gain internship that involves radio in some capacity.
Sydney-Paige Patterson is a third-year doctoral student in the Indiana University Bloomington History Department. She is a native of Gary, Indiana. Sydney-Paige is a former Hudson and Holland scholar, who earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English and African American and African Diaspora Studies from IU Bloomington in 2013. She finished her Master of Art degree in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University.
Sydney-Paige’s doctoral research addresses the ways Black and Dalit (or Untouchable) women contribute intellectual labor for patriarchal led social movements by examining the connections between the Black Panthers Party and Dalit Panther Party in Maharashtra, India. The Won-Joon Yoon scholarship will be used for her summer research which will be working with IU Historian Scott Libson and librarians at Stanford University and Emory University to access the primary materials on the Black Panther Party that she needs to complete her dissertation.