|
WELLESLEY, Mass. - Three students at Wellesley College,
seniors Alison S. Kuklok of Portland, Ore., and Kathryn
E. O'Rourke of Houston, Texas, and 2001 graduate Margaret
A. Samu of Natick, Mass., have been awarded 2002 Andrew
W. Mellon Fellowships in Humanistic Studies. In addition,
senior Stephanie M. Morales of El Paso, Texas, has been
named an alternate in the competition.
The Mellon Fellowship, designed to help exceptionally promising
students prepare for careers of teaching and scholarship
in humanistic disciplines, is a competitive award for first-year
doctoral students. Fellows may take their awards to any
accredited graduate program in the United States or Canada.
For the year 2002, 85 Fellowships were awarded. The Fellowship
covers graduate tuition and required fees for the first
year of graduate study and includes a stipend of $17,500.
Kuklok will take her Mellon Fellowship to Stanford University,
where she will work toward a Ph.D. in philosophy. The daughter
of Dennis Kuklok and Melissa Goodman, she is a Davis Scholar
at Wellesley, graduating summa cum laude and majoring in
philosophy. She has been awarded first prize in the Three
Generations Writing Competition and has been a nominee for
the Barbara Bush Award for Volunteerism and the Dean Daniels
Summer Service Internship.
A 1992 graduate of Corvallis (Ore.) High School, Kuklok
attended Portland (Ore.) Community College from 1997-1999,
majoring in French and Spanish. From 1993-1995, she attended
the San Francisco Art Institute, majoring in painting and
drawing. She has researched, written and compiled a set
of online study notes on Voltaire's Candide through
BookRags Inc. of Newton, Mass., one of the initial entries
on the BookRags website providing free classic literature
study guides for college students. At Wellesley, she has
worked in the college archives reporting directly to the
chief archivist.
O'Rourke, the daughter of Joanne Edmundson and Terence
O'Rourke of Houston, is a candidate for graduation with
honors in architecture. Double majoring in architecture
and English, she has been named a Rhodes Scholar semifinalist
and was nominated for a Marshall Scholarship. She has been
named a Jerome A. Schiff Fellow and won First-Year Academic
Distinction, the 2001 Stecher Scholarship for study of art
in Europe and the 2000 Summer Multicultural Research Program
Grant.
A 1997 graduate of Lamar High School in Houston, she has
worked as an independent architectural photographer whose
work has been included in the Visual Resources Collection
at Wellesley. She also has served as house president of
Stone Hall and as a member of the House Presidents' Council
and a resident adviser.
O'Rourke will use her Mellon Fellowship to attend the
Ph.D. program in the history of art at the University of
Pennsylvania. She recently has completed a thesis in architecture
titled "Juan O'Gorman and the Meaning of Modern Architecture
in Mexico" that examines the architect's 1930s International
Style houses for Mexico City intellectuals and his own break
with modernism.
Samu, the daughter of Robert and Judith Shamu of Kalamazoo,
Mich., was a Davis Scholar who double majored in art history
and French at Wellesley. She served on the Committee Against
Racism and Discrimination and as president of House Council
for Davis Scholars and Postbaccalaureate Students. Her honors
include 2001 Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude awards,
Departmental Honors in Art History, several Prix Germaine
Lefeuille for French literary analysis, the Schiff Fellowship
for senior honors thesis research, the Davis Art Prize in
Writing and the Stecher Scholarship Grant for Summer Study
Abroad in Art.
After high school, Samu worked as a professional ballet
dancer for 11 years, coming to Wellesley in 1996. She now
teaches ballet at Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick,
Mass., and works as a research assistant in the French and
Art History departments at Wellesley while studying Russian
at an advanced level.
She will use her Mellon Fellowship to attend graduate school
at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where
she will study 19th-century European art, with a special
interest in the connections between French and Russian culture
during that period.
More than 1,800 Mellon Fellows have been named since the
competition began in 1982. Mellon Fellows now holding the
Ph.D. are teachers and scholars at some of the nation's
top colleges and universities.
Founded in 1875, Wellesley College has been a leader in
liberal arts and the education of women for 125 years. The
College's 500-acre campus near Boston is home to 2,300 undergraduate
students.
###
|
