Description:

Global Café is a great resource and opportunity for students to connect with graduate student mentors to acquire the tools and resources necessary for conducting independent research, applying for grants or fellowships, writing an honors thesis, applying to graduate school, and more. The Global Café Event Series features conversations with unique, diverse speakers each quarter during the academic year. The small, workshop-style talks are a perfect opportunity to connect with alumni, graduate students, and international scholars.

About the speaker

Stephen Hill is Senior Associate Director for Operations at Northwestern's Office Of Fellowships and a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology.

Stephen hails from south-central Pennsylvania, where he frolicked in creeks (“cricks”) and skinned his knees. The child of teachers, he came by his need to tell you how it should be quite early and honestly. His father’s love of all manner of flora (especially fruit and nut trees) and fauna (“critters”) led Steve to study biology in college. He concentrated in marine biology and can, to this day, describe the ampullae of Lorenzini and tell you on which end of a shark to look for them.

Following a disastrous attempt to learn sufficient electronics to make musical instruments for people with limited dexterity, he joined the Peace Corps. Hoping to work in marine fisheries projects in the South Pacific, he jumped at the chance to work in freshwater fisheries in Tanzania. Two years in Tanzania yielded fluency in Swahili, a desire to study ethnomusicology, and a German wife. He wooed her in Swahili!

After the Peace Corps, Steve showed up on the doorstep of the musicology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and refused to leave until they gave him a PhD. He did produce a Fulbright- and Wenner-Gren-funded dissertation on the music and dance clubs in the Matengo region of southwestern Tanzania, so they didn’t just give him the doctorate for his winning personality. Along the way, he became proficient in German and was once a fairly good saron player and singer in the UIUC gamelan.

Steve first came to Northwestern in 2001 for a three-year replacement position in the Bienen School of Music. He moved to the Office of Fellowships, in 2004, where he manages several fellowships competitions and gives grant-writing workshops to unsuspecting graduate students across the campus. He is a longtime fellow in ISRC, makes and plays open-back banjos, is still married to his sweetheart from Tanzania, and has two college-age children.

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92308612720

Meeting ID:
923 0861 2720

Passcode:
799716