War-torn Niger, electron-positron colliders and astral planes helped some of Harvard's most talented thesis writers win Thomas Temple Hoopes Prizes this year.

The 49 winning senior theses, chosen by a Faculty committee of about 50, included papers, a documentary and a four-movement musical composition.

Any undergraduate project may be nominated for the prize, which carries a $2,500 award for the student and a $750 stipend for the adviser.

Anthropology concentrator Elizabeth Harman '97 challenged the assumption that African art has value only when free from Western influence in her thesis, according to her advisor, J. Lorand Matory, Foster associate professor of anthropology and of Afro-American studies.

Harman took "a step beyond the most avant-guard revisions in the literature," Matory said.

Harman's thesis "is based upon some very brave and insightful field research conducted under very challenging circumstances to say the least," Matory said. "Both the Committee on African Studies, generally, which funded her field research, and I, personally, feared for her safety because...there is a war of secession going on in Niger."

Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator Laura C. Johnson '97 produced an hour-long documentary film on "New Age spirituality in the American Southwest, and the tangled web between mothers and daughters in this world and the next," she said.

"It definitely shows something on film that I think no one has seen before: an actual channeling of a spirit from the astral plane," she said.

"The background of the film is conversations between my mother and her deceased mother," Johnson said.

Campus activist and social studies concentrator Jedediah S. Purdy '97 said that his thesis on Michel de Montaigne "proposed that [Montaigne's] essays form a specifically literary style of moral argument that aims to reshape the reader's moral imagination."

Purdy connected his thesis with his political life as president of Perspective and as a founder of the Progressive Undergraduate Council Coalition:

"The relation, I think, is that both stem from an enduring interest in what circumstances--institutional and economic and spiritual--can lead people to treat each other with respect and decency," he said.

Brent L. Auerbach '97 wrote a 25-minute neo-romantic musical composition titled "Summer's End for Woodwind Nonet" for his music department thesis.

His adviser, Visiting Lecturer on Music Michael J. Gandolfi, praised his advisee, saying Auerbach "worked very steadily" and produced a "finely crafted piece" with a real substance and life