Lessons from the Road

In January 2009, Monica Byrne ’03 boarded a plane to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She carried a rugged backpack and had slung a smaller one in front as she embarked on a fellowship that felt almost implausible. The trip would last only four months. “But I was just transformed from head to toe,” Byrne says. “Nothing could be how it was before.”

From the plane window hours later, Byrne watched the Earth tilt as they descended. “It just feels like you’re landing on a whole other planet,” she says. The Simien Mountains were “just breathtaking. But so alien.” Traveling alone to a place utterly unlike the small town in Pennsylvania where she grew up rearranged her inner landscape, she says. Throughout the trip, she journaled obsessively and made notes in a separate book just for a novel taking shape in fragments.

That year, Byrne was a recipient of the Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship, which for 60 years has been one of Wellesley’s most distinctive gifts to its alumnae. Established through the will of Alice Alvira Stevens, class of 1891, in honor of her aunt Mary, the fellowship provides funding for alums at least 25 years old to design and pursue independent travel abroad, guided by an intellectual, artistic, or personal vision. (Very little is known about the Stevens family and what motivated Alice’s bequest.)

At a time when women traveling independently abroad was still considered daring, Stevens imagined future graduates setting out into the world with purpose, curiosity, and courage. Today, the fellowship provides a stipend of up to approximately $25,000 to support up to one year of international travel. In her will, Stevens expressed the hope that recipients would approach unfamiliar cultures and “alien conditions” with generosity of spirit, maturity of observation, and a love of beauty. The award is less about geography than it is about growth.

Before her Stevens application, Byrne had written only a handful of short stories. “The application forced me to take myself and my work seriously enough to put together a cohesive proposal,” she says. She created color-coded spreadsheets, researched costs, and printed photographs outlining a journey to find inspiration for a novel. When the fellowship came through, she says, “It was an act of faith in me that was just unprecedented, this freakish bequest that says, ‘I believe in you,’ when nobody else does.”

From Ethiopia, Byrne moved on to South India and then the South Pacific, scouting locations for the work-in-progress that would become The Girl in the Road, her critically acclaimed first novel. Published in 2014, it is set in a future where India and Africa have become economic superpowers—and its landscapes come directly from her Stevens Fellowship travels.

There were moments of cultural dislocation, Byrne says. In Mumbai, bleary with jet lag, she stared at a McDonald’s menu wondering, “Where are the beef burgers?” Then the realization: “You’re in India.” (Beef is unusual on Indian menus.) There were harder moments, too, when she says she felt “very distressed, lonely, upset, scared.” Yet something steadier emerged. “You learn that you can take care of yourself,” she says, “Like, ‘Oh, I can improvise my way through difficult situations.’”

Her Stevens itinerary would eventually shift the geography of her novel. But the deeper shift was internal. “It made my whole life possible,” she says. “It made my whole life and my whole career possible. It would not exist in the form it does now without that fellowship.”

Since 2022, Byrne has lived on the road around the world while writing, traveling from Tunisia to New Zealand to Vietnam, Mongolia, Greece, and more. She now lives in Sligo, Ireland, where she is pursuing a master’s of creative practice and working on a travel memoir. “After that, who knows?” Byrne says.

Administering joy

For the last decade, Kate Dailinger, director of fellowships for the College, has administered the Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship. She calls it “the ultimate magic wand.” As Monica Byrne observed, even the act of applying can matter, she says.

“The Stevens gives people permission to dream a little bit and to dare to imagine a positive future,” she says. As “good stewards of the gift,” naming three to five fellows each year, the Stevens selection committee adheres closely to the founder’s will, honoring what Dailinger calls its “generosity of view,” its call for “curiosity about other perspectives” and its insistence on a “deep love of beauty.”

In 1966, the first Stevens Fellow, Alice Lee Norton ’47, received $7,000 for a trip around the world by ship and plane. Since then, 151 recipients (including three who are in the field this year) have collectively circumnavigated the globe many times. From LGBTQ+ legacies in New Zealand to the intersection of art, technology, and society in Spain, the fellows’ projects in recent years reflect the complexities of the 21st century.

The language of Stevens’ will shapes the fellowship committee’s deliberations, guiding them toward projects that embody “purposeful travel into unfamiliar territory” and “inspiring reflection and growth.” Six decades on, its spirit remains radical—a commitment to alums who have the courage to dare.

A chance to reset

For Eleanor Bastian ’06, the Mary Elvira Stevens 2016–17 journey began with burnout. “I didn’t set out to change my life,” she says. “I just knew I couldn’t keep living it the way I was.”

Bastian, who majored in political science, had spent a decade in Washington, D.C., working on health care and environmental legislation on Capitol Hill at a relentless pace. She told the Stevens committee interviewing her for the fellowship, “I can’t keep doing this, but I really care about climate policy.”

Being awarded the fellowship gave her something more important than funding, she says. It gave her permission to step away without stepping off the path. For nearly a year, she traveled in Norway, Germany, and Morocco, connecting with NGOs and local sustainability experts, listening and learning rather than drafting memos and chasing legislation.

In Oslo, she studied electrification and the efficiency of systems built for the long term. In Berlin, she traced the aftershocks of the Energiewende (German for “energy turnaround,” a national strategy to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy), talking with policy experts about what it takes to move a nation’s grid. Morocco surprised her most, with its vast solar installations.

But travel also taught her to slow down, she says. It restored her sense that climate work is not only legislative negotiation but a human endeavor. The distance from Capitol Hill clarified what 10 years in the trenches had blurred: Policy is lived locally.

What she did not expect was that, amid site visits and policy conversations, she would meet someone who would change her life. “When I was in my first placement in Norway, one of my old friends from my class at Wellesley was like, I’m going to be in Stockholm with one of our other friends for this weekend. Do you want to take the train and join us? And I did, and we fell in love, and we’re now married.”

During her Stevens Fellowship, Bastian says, “I thought I was stepping away from my career. But I was actually building the foundation for the rest of my life.” Today, she and spouse Allison Kramer ’06 live in Seattle, where Bastian works at Amazon on sustainability and electrification initiatives, translating the big-picture questions she explored abroad into corporate action at home.

“I thought I was stepping away from my career. But I was actually building the foundation for the rest of my life.”

—Eleanor Bastian ’06

Bridging a great divide

“Oh, that was quite a long time ago,” Vazira Zamindar ’92, associate professor of history at Brown University, says of the fellowship she was awarded in 1998. At the time, she was a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, working on a dissertation about families divided by the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. It was an academic project, but it was also something far more intimate. “My own family is divided between Mumbai and Karachi,” she says.

The Stevens Fellowship made it possible for her to follow both the academic and the personal threads at once. “I applied to it specifically to document my own family’s history,” she says. Traveling to India and Pakistan, she carried with her “boxes and boxes of cassette tapes” on which she recorded aunts and uncles, cousins, and family elders in both countries.

Zamindar, who grew up in Karachi separated from the branch of her family that remained in India, carries her grandmother’s first name. She introduced herself that way to her extended family in Mumbai. “I’d be introduced as Vazira, and immediately people would be like, ‘Oh, Vazira-bai,’ and the stories about my grandmother would pour forth.” (Adding “bai” to a name denotes respect given to an elder.)

In a vast warehouse owned by relatives who supply furniture to Bollywood filmmakers, she found the remnants of a vanished household, left behind when her immediate family moved to Pakistan. “All the cupboards and cabinets, sofa sets and chandeliers, tables and vases, oh, my God,” she says, recalling that her mother, watching Bollywood films, would remark, “Oh, that cabinet used to be, this shelf used to be, you know, in the hallway.”

Zamindar carried the tapes with her everywhere she moved, but “it’s very hard to listen to them now. I don’t think I fully understood the significance of what I was recording at the time—that this would become an archive of so much grief and loss,” she says.

The academic book that grew from her travels was The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, History. Published in 2007, it reshaped the way scholars understand the 1947 division of British India by arguing that partition was not a single cataclysmic event but a prolonged process that unfolded over decades. Zamindar examined how ordinary people experienced the drawing of new national boundaries through refugee camps, abandoned property claims, citizenship papers, and the slow, often painful reconstitution of everyday life.

What she cherished most about the Stevens Fellowship, she says, was the trust it placed in her. “Here was a fellowship that was given by a woman for a woman to travel with no strings attached. It was something that could be personal, intimate, and this faith was placed in me. All these years later that still means a lot to me,” she says.

Recently, Zamindar has felt the call of those recordings again. “Now is the time. I feel the urgency of it. I’ve always had a sense of responsibility for carrying these stories that I grew up with,” she says.

A time for reframing

For her Stevens Fellowship, artist Luisa Adelfio ’86 went to Mexico, because, she says, she “needed to be somewhere that felt completely outside of the framework of my life.”

The fellowship, which she received for 2022, gave her the rare gift of uninterrupted studio time. In the months before she left, Adelfio was juggling commissions and teaching, she says, “always producing, always delivering.” What she longed for was something less transactional. “I wanted to remember why I make art in the first place. Not for a client. Not for a deadline. To create a bridge between the material and the spiritual.”

In Oaxaca, she found a rhythm that surprised her. “The light is different there,” she says. “It’s stronger, but it’s also warmer. It makes colors behave differently.” As she walked to the print studio each morning, she allowed murals, markets, and the fabric of the city to seep into her vision and into her drawings. “I didn’t have predetermined ideas about my experience,” she says. “I was feeling my way into it.”

There were days when the unfamiliarity unsettled her. “Although I speak Spanish well, I am not a native speaker,” she says. “I had to be OK with not understanding or knowing all of the technical language of printmaking at the beginning.” But that vulnerability became part of the work. “When you’re outside your comfort zone, you’re more porous,” she says. “You allow ideas in.”

In Oaxaca, she encountered artisans whose methods had been passed down for generations. “Watching someone weave and create with that kind of artisanal lineage behind them changes your perspective,” she says. “It made me think about continuity: about what we inherit and what we choose to carry forward from that inheritance.”

By the end of the trip, Adelfio had created entire collections of new paintings, prints, and drawings. “I stopped trying to control every outcome,” she says. “Mexico taught me to let the work breathe.” When she returned home, her palette had shifted. “It’s not that I came back making ‘Mexican’ art; it’s that I came back changed, renewed.”

After her return, she was invited to have a show titled Transcendence at the Torggler Fine Arts Center at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. Her paintings, sculptural installations, and drawings, displayed in two galleries, represented pre- and post-COVID lockdown, and pre- and post-Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship work.

What remains most vivid for Adelfio from her six months in Mexico is not a single image but an epiphany. “There was a moment, standing in a courtyard at dusk, when everything felt suspended. I remember thinking, ‘This is why I travel. And this is why I make art.’”

Claiming an identity

The Stevens Fellowship led Cheryl Penn ’80 to unleash the power of making as well. In 2020, as COVID upended the world, Penn found herself working in an Amazon warehouse. “It was very clear to me that I was going to have to make some kind of move,” she says. The move would take her to Africa—this time with the Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship.

It was not her first Wellesley-sponsored sojourn on the continent. Her connection began in 1979, when she received the College’s Waddell Scholarship for travel in Africa. The experience marked her. By the 1980s, she was representing the state of Ohio across Europe, Africa, and Asia as part of the international trade division of the Ohio Department of Development, studying how global commerce moved.

The data told her that humanitarian aid too often treated symptoms, not structures. In 2007, she proposed that multinational corporations dedicate a small percentage of procurement spending to vetted African firms. The idea was straightforward. The reception was polite. Nothing changed.

Meanwhile, she had been sewing her own clothes for years. Strangers stopped her on the street to remark on the outfits she had created—and to ask where they could get them. “I kind of shunned that,” she says. “I did it for my own self, right? The idea of monetizing that was just not something that I was interested in doing. Quite the opposite.” She laughs. “I’ve never bought a fashion magazine in my life.”

But something was about to shift. “I certainly didn’t see any connection between my interest in international equity and my sewing and designing,” she says. “How are those things relevant? How do those things possibly come together?”

And yet they did. In a revelatory moment, she realized she had never thanked God for “downloading a set of skills” in her—including the skill to tailor a perfect white shirt. She says she thought, “You’ll take the white shirt, and you’re going to go to Ghana.” Cheryl Penn Designs emerged from that reckoning, followed by The White Shirt Project, a single-source production model rooted in Ghana, with fabric sourced in Burkina Faso and tailored by local craftspeople.

For Penn, who serves on the Stevens selection committee, the program is inseparable from Wellesley itself. “It’s the zeitgeist,” she says. “This concentration on the development of the mind and soul is critical.” Years ago, a cabbie driving her to campus from Logan once scoffed, “What kind of job can you get from that?” when she told him she went to Wellesley. She answered simply: “If I can think, I can do anything.”

That is just what Alice Alvira Stevens had in mind.