Newnham in America

Spotlight on Newnham US Alumnae

In this section we introduce Newnhamites around the US to each other. We are interested in what’s happening now so please tell us what is capturing your time and interest currently, with a little detail about how you arrived here since Newnham days. Please do contact Helen Goddard (hgoddard@ias.edu) with your picture (wellies, spouses and other props most welcome!) and a little commentary. If you would like to read past spotlights, visit the Archives section.

A DREAM COME TRUE: Marianne O

In 1981, I had the privilege to meet Dr. Jean Floud, the then Newnham principal, when she came to visit Hong Kong (my home town) at the invitation of Sir David Li who later founded the Prince Philip Scholarship Fund for Hong Kong students to attend Cambridge. I was not a Fund scholar. But having met Dr. Floud, I knew that my dream was to get into Cambridge and my first choice would be Newnham. I finished my A-Levels in Bournemouth, England and was gratefully admitted into Newnham to read Economics in 1984.

Due to Newnham’s beautiful, intellectual, relaxing and safe environment, I, as have many others, have learnt to become an independent and confident woman, having the courage to try new things - getting up at 5 o’clock to row in freezing water, performing lunch-time piano recitals with the Raleigh Society, singing with the University Choir and the University Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, riding bicycle in the snow, and many others.

After Cambridge, I returned to Hong Kong to work at Citicorp in Merchant Banking. My education at Newnham gave me the courage to leave my comfortable home to come to Berkeley in California to study MBA in 1992. My goal then was to become a fund manager investing in international markets. I started as an analyst and gained experience to become a fund manager and have never left the San Francisco Bay Area since. I now help my main Partner run a global hedge fund with focus on emerging markets ranging from Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey to Venezuela. Though I am often glued to my Bloomberg machine, I would not have enjoyed quite as much another career - a job that pays me to learn about the world and markets. In San Francisco, I also met my better half who went to Sidney Sussex to do engineering. To me, Cambridge still is like a dream but Newnham has made my own dreams come true.

SEARCH AND RESCUE: Jackie Tubis (NC 1973)

Flying across the desert as part of a Californian Search and Rescue (SAR) team is a far cry from her previous position at Schlumberger as President of the Automatic Test Equipment Division, but Jackie loves her new role. Having ‘semi-retired’, she now divides her time between business management consulting and volunteering with the California Wing of the Civil Air Patrol – an auxiliary of the US Air Force which is chartered with airborne search and rescue activities for light, non-commercial aircraft. She has responded on a number of missions, most notably in 2007, when she flew as a scanner during the search for missing aviator Steve Fossett.

Valerie Meyers with Dame Patricia

COEDITING LIFE: Valerie Meyers

Surely I must be the only Newnham alumna to get married in Okinawa! This was in October 1965, one of the many cultural shocks I've enjoyed in my life. Perhaps the first was in 1960, when I left my crowded working-class home in Birmingham for the calm, quiet, austere, floor-polish-smelling Newnham. After graduation I went to Italy for a year to teach English and learn Italian, then on to UCLA as an English-Speaking Union student, where I met my husband Jeffrey, the reason I found myself in Okinawa a year later - he had a job teaching college courses to US soldiers.

We have been settled in Berkeley since 1992, but in the early years we traveled round the world twice, and lived in London and Spain.

Our daughter Rachel was born in London in 1972. I taught high school English in Boston and in the writing program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where Jeffrey was a professor. I published a short book on Orwell's fiction for Macmillan in 1991, and have been Jeffrey's co-editor on an Orwell bibliography and an anthology of Conan Doyle. I continue to work as a researcher, editor and indexer, mostly for my husband?s biographies, the latest of which is "Samuel Johnson: The Struggle", published December 2008 by Basic Books.

I have always liked this kind of work - meeting people associated with the subject, listening and participating in the interviews, going to far-off libraries. When we arrived in Colorado in 1975, it was a particular thrill to drive down to Taos and meet the artist Dorothy Brett, then in her nineties, friend of D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. As a child she had taken dancing classes with the royal children, and later we wondered, did we shake the hand that shook the hand of Queen Victoria? Even reading through boxes of material in a library can be exciting. I shall not forget reading Orwell's forceful handwriting at U.C. London, or finding the uncatalogued, faded pink love letters slipped into one of Edmund Wilson's folders at Yale.

So much in my life I owe to the 1944 Education Act and the free education I received at Newnham. I completely agree with the playwright Alan Bennett that education should be free. Until that happy day returns I contribute what I can to the college's scholarship resources.

Rumu with her law professor Sir Eli Lauterpacht on his 80th birthday celebration

PRIZEWINNING POSTCONFLICT PLANS: Rumu Sarkar

Rumu Sarkar (1983 Law post-grad at Whitstead) has been awarded the Grand Prize by the St. Cyr Foundation for her essay, “A Fearful Symmetry: A New Global Balance of Power?” The St. Cyr Foundation supports the St. Cyr military academy (“France’s West Point”). The paper addressed the topic of “Stabilization and Reconstruction – how to achieve coherence among all of the players in post-conflict reconstruction”. Rumu was unanimously awarded the First (Grand) Prize by a jury of four distinguished panelists.

Rumu received the award on May 27, 2008 at a special ceremony at the Hôtel des Invalides, Paris, along with a cash prize of 10,000 Euros. The U.S. Ambassador to France, His Excellency Craig R. Stapleton, and the Indian Ambassador to France, His Excellency Ranjan Mathai, were invited to attend along with dignitaries from other embassies, senior French military officers, and other officials. U.S. Colonel Michael McGurk attended the function and delivered remarks on behalf of the U.S. Ambassador. Brigadier General A.K. Sharma, the military attaché for the Embassy of India in Paris, attended the function.

Rumu is currently serving as Senior Legal Advisor to CALIBRE Systems, a defense consulting group based in Alexandria, VA. Immediately prior to this position, she was the former General Counsel for the 2005 Defense Base Closure and Realignment (BRAC) Commission. She also served as the General Counsel for the Overseas Basing Commission, prior to joining the BRAC Commission.

Rumu was also the former Assistant General Counsel for Administrative Affairs for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), and formerly a staff attorney with the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). She began her career as a litigation associate with two Wall Street law firms in New York. Rumu is also a Visiting Researcher and an Adjunct Law Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center where she teaches a graduate law (LL.M.) seminar, and has published law review articles on a variety of subjects. Rumu has authored two legal textbooks, “Development Law and International Finance”, now going into a third edition, and “Transitional Business Law”.

ALIEN DESIGN: Jenny Polak

I am a third generation Newnhamite and graduated in 1980 with a B.A. in Architecture. I came to the USA in 1990 and am married to Dread Scott, also an artist. We have an 11-year-old son.

I make architectural installations, drawings and web projects. I display contradictory impulses of attention and inattention, visibility and secrecy, in the cheery terms of interior design consumption. My designer alter ego, Design For The Alien Within, promotes hypothetical hiding and dwelling places for people without immigration documents. I draw or make nearly life-like yet improbable structures. Posing as modern furniture, infrastructural elements and building kits, the designs are mutated for, or by the dangers of today’s immigration and border politics. I come from England and my family history of hiding and migration fuels my preoccupation with alliances between undocumented or stateless people and citizens, often formed in defiance of laws. Interacting with my work, viewers reinvent the immigrant-citizen power-relations (at home, at work) to which it refers.

Jenny Polak

Jenny with 11-year old son

Jenny’s latest art was recently the subject of a juried solo show at Rutgers University called “The Culture of Right / The Rights of Culture: Jenny Polak” that provided a visual arts component to The Institute for Research on Women interdisciplinary seminar there. Here are some photos of some of her work.

Image 1: “Design For The Alien Within; the Media Center” (full size furniture with hiding space). Image 2: “Tower Kit, No Crane Required” (21 ft cardboard periscope, seen recently in Democracy in America at the Park Ave. Armory). Image 3: drawing of closet in “How To Hide” series. Image 4: of the “Return to Sender: the Raided Work Sites” series, of a group of about 13 small acrylic paintings commemorating jobs done by immigrant labor in the US.