Two seniors and one Dartmouth graduate recently received prestigious scholarships for post-graduate studies from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Lisa McGill '95, Antonio Talvares '93 and Susan Zeiger '95 were among the 97 recipients of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies.
More than 800 students nation-wide applied for the scholarship, which provides students with $13,250 and will cover tuition and fees for their first year of graduate study.
The fellows include 57 women and 40 men in fields such as anthropology, comparative literature, English, history, philosophy and art history, according to a press release.
The Mellon grants are given to "college seniors and recent graduates of outstanding promise, with the objective of encouraging and assisting them to join the humanities faculties of America's colleges and universities," the press release said.
McGill, an English major modified with Latin American and Caribbean studies, wrote her thesis on "the emergence of Black Puerto Rican identity in U.S. literary works."
Next year, McGill will being a six-year Ph.D. program in American Studies at Yale University. At Yale, she will study the black experience in the United States through a comparative, cross-cultural study of Black Latino and mainland Black Caribbean literatures, she said. "I am happy that I received the Fellowship and I was surprised because throughout the interview process I didn't think I was going to get it," she said.
Zeiger, an English and creative writing major, will also be entering a six-year Ph.D program in literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Zieger, the former arts and entertainment editor of The Dartmouth, is currently working on a creative writing thesis.
"I haven't yet specified a concentration [within the Ph.D program], but my current interests are post-colonial theory, queer theory and 20th-century poetry," Zieger wrote in an electronic-mail message.
Zeiger was surprised "the foundation was willing to back up such a lucidly defined project especially when government funding for higher education is dwindling."
Talvares could not be contacted for comment.
