By Carrie PorterThe Daily Northwestern

Northwestern’s brightest lit up the dim restaurant with conversations ranging in topic from Flemish tapestry to string theory at The Graduate School’s Presidential Fellowship dinner last week.

The quarterly dinner is one of the ways The Graduate School is working to unify the graduate student body and bridge the different realms of academia within the school.

At this event, top graduate students known as Presidential Fellows meet to discuss their latest research and gain insight from one another.

Founded in 2002, the Society of Fellows provides an outlet for students to share their work and learn from their peers as junior fellows. A committee of top NU faculty members, or Senior Fellows, selects the group.

The fellows also participate in a 24-hour retreat, where they each present their recent studies.

The society plays a significant part in the effort to bring together students from varying backgrounds of study.

“We have this problem of divisions between the different schools where often the students are studying the same thing and don’t know it,” said Ezra Getzler, a senior fellow and mathematics professor.

Ben Ponder, a junior fellow specializing in rhetoric in communication studies, suggested that such communication is vital to providing a rich educational experience.

“There is a fundamental problem of communication across the university. There are three clusters of study: the hard sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, and they aren’t mutually intelligible,” he said.

Senior fellow and McCormick professor Abraham Haddad described the link between the clusters as crucial to one’s academic success.

“Any time you are doing technological stuff you need to know the social impact,” he said.

Beyond connecting schools, the Society of Fellows plays an instrumental role in sharpening fellows’ individual communication skills.

“We want to have rich interdisciplinary dialogues that provide a snapshot of what’s going on across the university,” Ponder said. “It is a quintessential academic moment, where in a compact time frame you get to hear cutting-edge research at Northwestern.”

Ponder presented several chapters of “Independence Unfurled: Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ and The American Controversy of 1776,” the working title of his dissertation, at the dinner.

“It is really helpful to talk about your research to people who don’t do what you do,” Ponder said.

Tobin Shearer, a fellow studying history and religion, suggests that it widens his think-base.

“It forces me to find ways to talk about my research and avoid jargon. The kind of questions we get you just don’t receive when you’re working with others within your discipline,” he said. “I think that interdisciplinary study sounds like a dead concept until you really begin to live it out.”

Reach Carrie Porter at [email protected].