Announcing the 2021 Zabar Scholars

For three years, the League has been fortunate to work with Lori Zabar and the Zabar Family Foundation to award scholarships to the best and brightest preservation students from around New York State. Earlier this year, an independent panel met to review the 2021 Zabar Family Scholarship applications. The three winning students will receive $1,000 to support their education and research. Congratulations to Olivia Chaudhury, Katlyn Foster, and Emily Kahn!

Meet the 2021 recipients:

Olivia Chaudhury is currently enrolled in the Historic Preservation Planning master’s program at Cornell University, where she also completed her undergraduate degree. While studying urban planning, she learned about Underground Railroad conductor John W. Jones, a man who escaped slavery and settled in Elmira, NY. Through extensive research, she discovered that Jones had lived at 99 Second Street in Elmira between 1868-1871. By the time she visited the site, the three-story brick building was gone, leaving an overgrown lot in its place. This experience set her on the path of pursuing historic preservation. According to Olivia: “I never shied away from history. I was born in the United States and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh by an Italian-American mother and Bangladeshi-American father. While my cousins in the US learned Hawaii was “gifted” to the US, that chapter in my international school textbook was titled 'American Imperialism.' Coming back to the United States for college, I was surprised to realize the gaps and lack of different perspectives in history education. Black, Indigenous and women’s histories are often afterthoughts in popular history textbooks. I am in a constant process of learning; discovering contradictions and missing pieces, confronting the uncomfortable past as it comes." Olivia is currently a researcher and writer for the John W. Jones Museum and is actively working to add Jones to the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

Katlyn Foster is a Historic Preservation graduate student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Katlyn started her career as an architect, first in new design and construction and then focusing on preservation architecture. She moved to New York in 2016 and enrolled at Columbia in 2019 to give her preservation practice a broader foundation on which to build. Her goal was to expand her knowledge of the field beyond architecture to incorporate the social histories embodied within the built environment. She is particularly interested in questioning how the preservation field supports (or hinders) equity in our communities. “My thesis research seeks to examine questions of sociospatial inclusion and representation in preservation by examining the geographies of protection it creates in relation to the geographies of injustice created by contemporaneous urban policies: specifically, examining the social and spatial relationship of historic landmark districting and redlining in urban America. I hope that my research will contribute to self-reflection in the field of preservation around how preservation can be equitable and accessible for all communities and all historic narratives in the future.“

Emily Kahn completed her master’s degree in Historic Preservation from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in the spring of 2021. Emily has known since she was 11-years-old that she wanted to be a preservationist. While studying history and museum studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, Emily interned with the Boston Preservation Alliance and Nantucket Preservation Trust. She is currently a project consultant for NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. During her time at Columbia, her research focused on Holocaust refugees and their children in Washington Heights, as a way to re-envision Holocaust commemoration to celebrate refugees in America. She continues to produce oral histories and is hoping to nominate a building or district related to this community to the National Register of Historic Places. According to Emily, “Becoming a preservationist has allowed me to connect to my own history and to help others connect to their heritage. This intimate connection is what drove me most to enter this field and continues to motivate me to advocate for and amplify the voices of institutionally-underrepresented communities.“