Hannah Epstein '26 Receives Watson Fellowship to Study Journalism Abroad

My grant was for fieldwork in France and Spain to research and pursue a fictional account of the life of Jeanne d'Albret, a key figure in 16th-century France. I had spent my junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris, and I now live in France as a lawyer representing French businesses in U.S. inbound transactions. The Watson experience helped shape me as an adult, and I continue building on the gifts it gave me to this day. Bryn Mawr built my intellectual confidence, and I wanted to complement that with more visceral, life-skill confidence. In that regard, the Watson year was a real success. 

I traveled to Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (known in 1984 as "Zaire"), and France to study national parks and nature reserves that allowed for limited human uses and, in some cases, permanent villages and farms. I wanted to know how the managers of these areas balanced the interests of wildlife, people, and the ecosystems they shared. In America, people can visit our national parks, but they can't live or farm in them. I'm retired after a wonderful career working primarily for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Organization for the Assabet River, and the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance to restore and protect rivers, streams, estuaries, and bays in New England.

I studied the interactions between immigrant Muslim women and health and legal institutions in France, England, Sweden, and Russia, and attended conferences and conducted interviews in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy. The year had a profound impact on my professional path, leading to earning a master's degree at the Centre for Research in International Migration and Ethnic Relations (CEIFO) at Stockholm University. I later embarked on doctoral studies, wrote two books, and am now working on forthcoming book projects about war, economics, and more. 

My Watson Fellowship explored the impacts of tourism on culture and environment across three very different settings: Nepal, Antarctica, and Botswana. The Watson planted seeds I didn't fully recognize at the time. What started as questions about tourism's impact on culture and environment gradually became questions about how where you live, what you do, and how what surrounds you shapes your health. That curiosity led me to medicine and eventually to public health. I practiced emergency medicine for nearly two decades, served as Alaska's Chief Medical Officer during COVID-19, and am now a senior policy fellow at the Yale School of Public Health. The Watson taught me to pay attention to the systems around people — not just the people themselves — and that instinct has guided everything since. 

I explored how communities and collectives came together to respond to sexual harm. I visited more than 10 countries that year, but the highlights were Nepal, Kenya, Malawi, Scotland, and Australia. My Watson year showed me that we are capable of far more than we often imagine, especially when we learn to trust ourselves and others. I hold the stories of each person I spoke to close to my heart, and I am thankful to them every day for their courage and bravery. I am now entering my fourth year of medical school at Penn State. The fellowship gave me tools to approach medicine in a more humanistic and culturally sensitive way. I hope to pursue a career in urologic surgery, with a focus on reconstruction, gender-affirming care, and sexual medicine. 

I traveled to 12 countries in Africa and Asia to explore the impact of collective narratives on social and political processes. My time in Ghana showed me the significant role of mining in the current tech-energy transformation and inspired me to research the supply chains of critical minerals as part of my master’s degree in development studies at Cambridge University. I am now working with the Climate for Compatible Growth, which engages with governments in Asia and Africa to create resource-governance frameworks.  

My Watson project "Who Is Reading to Children?" took me to Malaysia, Italy, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. I collaborated with NGOs, children's bookstores, libraries, local schools, and book festivals, all dedicated to promoting literacy and fostering parent-child reading experiences. I'm currently a program developer at Chinese Culture Connection, a nonprofit in Malden, Massachusetts, where I focus on cross-cultural arts programming and community building. One project I'm especially proud of is building a bilingual community library in Malden, stocked with high-quality children's books for immigrant families. I also do freelance work in children's books. Most recently, I was approached by Phaidon to do a cultural review for an upcoming picture book about the Chinese zodiac, which will be published this October. 

So far in my Watson year, I've traveled to the United Kingdom, Norway, the Philippines, and Italy to study choral music — what, when, where, why, and how people sing together. I'm currently in Rome, and I had the privilege of hearing the Sistine Chapel Choir as they supported the Papal celebration of Easter. I'm visiting more choirs all over Europe in May and finishing off my year in South Africa.