An Evening Dedicated to Honoring Scholars

An Evening Dedicated to Honoring Scholars

By Rebecca Goldfine

The College held its annual Honors Day ceremony on the evening of May 1, 2026, to recognize students' academic achievements.

In Studzinski Hall's Kanbar Auditorium, President Safa Zaki welcomed students, faculty, and visitors, and acknowledged the significance of the night. Honors Day at Bowdoin, she said, focuses specifically on prizes from academic departments and programs, allowing the College to celebrate students' talents, hard work, and accomplishments.

Dean for Academic Affairs Jennifer Scanlon then introduced the event's keynote speaker, Assistant Professor of English John Kim.

In accordance with Bowdoin tradition, the winner of the Sydney B. Karofsky Award for Junior Faculty the previous year delivers the event's address. Based on student evaluations, the Karofsky prize is presented to an outstanding junior faculty member who demonstrates a great ability to impart knowledge, inspire enthusiasm, and stimulate intellectual curiosity.

Kim is a scholar of comparative literature working at the intersection of literature, science, and philosophy across modern East Asia (Korea, China, Japan) and Europe. His research focuses on nonverbal forms of expression in literature, criticism, and theory, while his teaching interests span premodern to contemporary East Asian literature and film. He is completing a book on the scientific visualization of literature across East Asia and the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Kim began his talk by questioning the seemliness of celebrating when "the world out there, by all metrics, hangs in the balance. Out there, old ghosts continue to haunt us, while new terrors emerge on the horizon every day."

Rather than immediately addressing his question, he used the prompt to consider what was being celebrated that evening: a Bowdoin education. "Questions of timeliness often serve as screens for questions of perceived value," he said.

Read "Uncommon Good," by John Kim.

Kim then turned his attention to a close reading of Joseph McKeen's 1802 inaugural address as Bowdoin's first president. "His speech makes clear that the expectation for the student was never one of quantifiable impact: McKeen is careful to emphasize that the kind of intellectual, physical, and moral cultivation that students are to undergo at Bowdoin is preparatory: your education, he says, is not meant for you to be useful so much as for you to 'qualify [yourself] for usefulness.'"

Kim went on to argue that labor-most pertinently the labor of learning and of writing-is "the best training ground for meaning." "Writing," he continued, "remains the best (or perhaps most honest) image we have of the mind. To rely on tools and technologies that remove the friction-and the anguish-of writing is worse than throwing a digital filter on a selfie; it is a betrayal of that fundamental tenet of Western philosophy that says, 'Know thyself.'"

He concluded that, despite the atrocities occurring beyond Bowdoin, this was a time to rejoice: "What you have done here-and what is worth celebrating-is how you have immersed yourselves in the kind of laborious learning that McKeen envisioned for Bowdoin. Your coursework, papers, independent research projects, and works of art and performance are proof of this."

He called this work "uncommon good," work that "has never been about usefulness, but about qualifying yourself for the greater common good that is to come. So that you might major in Africana studies-and one day become mayor of New York City."

Following Kim's address, Scanlon announced the winner of the 2027 Karofsky Prize: Aliosha Barranco Lopez, assistant professor of philosophy. Barranco Lopez works in traditional epistemology, as well as its intersection with the philosophy of technology.

The Karofsky award is generously funded by members of the Karofsky family, including Peter S. Karofsky '62, Paul I. Karofsky '66, and David M. Karofsky '93.

The musical interlude this year, Libertango, by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), was performed by pianists George Lopez and Gulimina Mahamuti and vocal percussionist Kari Francis. [On the video, it starts at 22:20]

Faculty chairs then presented departmental and program prizes to students in recognition of their scholarly accomplishments. See the complete list of honorees.

To conclude the evening, singers Rithmaka Karunadhara '26, Sophie Zhang '29, Sree Kandhadai '27, and Greta Limberger '29 performed "Raise Songs to Bowdoin," with Lopez on piano.

Photos by Andrew Estey.

Published May 05, 2026