UF student is awarded prestigious Beinecke Scholarship

June 2, 2008

Undergraduate Hananie Albert — an anthropology, English and French triple major — has been awarded a prestigious Beinecke Scholarship, which will enable her to pursue a graduate degree in the humanities and social sciences. She plans to use the $34,000 award to obtain a doctorate in Africana studies after she receives a bachelor’s degree in the spring of 2009.

Albert is one of 22 students selected across the nation for the 2008 Beinecke award. She is the only recipient hailing from the state of Florida.

The scholarship program was established in 1971 by the board of directors of The Sperry and Hutchinson Company to honor Edwin, Frederick, and Walter Beinecke. The board created an endowment to provide substantial scholarships for the graduate education of young men and women of exceptional promise.

A Haitian immigrant, Albert taught herself English as a child by reading volumes of history books in her local library, becoming more versed in American history than many of her American born peers. She was puzzled by the lack of information she could obtain about her home country.

“As the oldest of six children, and the only one that had been born there, I felt it was my duty to know my history,” she said. “When I finally took a trip to Haiti during the summer before my freshman year of college, I found libraries with partial histories, censored by rulers before my time, and heavily guarded archives brimming with politically motivated reconstitutions of history. I was unsatisfied.”

When she became a student at the University of Florida, Albert set out to learn all she could about Haitian history — completing a research project through the University Scholars Program on the Fiyet Lalo, a female paramilitary force that operated in Haiti during the reign of notorious dictator Francois Duvalier.

“I have always been fascinated with what lies just beneath the range of perceptibility and, in the case of my research, it was an entire history,” Albert said. “My experiences as a research scholar at UF have given me the tools and the motivation to pursue life as a scholar in Africana studies. I hope this degree allows me to reconcile the academic and the everyday, by allowing histories, characters and ideas to speak truth into our present.”

Albert is also a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, Presidential Scholar, resident assistant, teaching assistant in African American studies, and a writer for BlackListed Magazine.