Four undergraduate students have been awarded grants by the Harvard Committee on African Studies to travel and study in Africa this summer.

Ceridwen Dovey ’03, Scott S. Lee ’03, Elizabeth Thornberry ’03 and Alfa Tiruneh ’03 are the four award recipients.

The grants, awarded in a merit competition, are given to Harvard juniors planning to do social science or humanities research in sub-Saharan Africa for their senior honors theses.

“I didn’t expect it but I was very happy to have gotten it,” said Thornberry, a social studies and women’s studies concentrator.

“I was really excited about the research I was doing and I wouldn’t be able to afford it otherwise,” she added.

Thornberry plans to research the effects of apartheid and post-apartheid government on young urban women in South Africa who have returned to rural homes from which they were previously displaced.

Tiruneh, who is this year’s Harvard African Students Association Alumni grant recipient, is a government concentrator.

“I knew beforehand that they would be very supportive. However, I also understood that they have very limited funds,” he said.

Tiruneh will be a part of a group of six undergraduates who will travel to Rwanda to examine the social effects of the country’s system of courts, intended to address the cases of the 120,000 prisoners still awaiting trial on genocide charges.

They will also try to determine what contribution toward post-conflict recovery methods the court system may make.

Dovey, an anthropology and visual and environmental sciences concentrator, will travel to South Africa to examine how labor relations between white farmers and their non-white workers have changed since both groups’ ethnic identities have been constructed and interpreted differently since the end of apartheid.

Lee, an anthropology and religion concentrator, will travel to Kenya to address local responses to HIV/AIDS through the intersection of health, culture and the political economy.

The students credit Rita M. Breen, the executive officer for the Committee on African Studies, and Eaton Professor of the Science of Government Robert H. Bates, a committee member, for their work in providing them with summer grants.

“They do a great deal behind the scenes to keep the continent afloat in the institution’s consciousness and on the University’s limited agenda,” Tiruneh said.

—Staff writer Anat Maytal can be reached at maytal@fas.harvard.edu.