Eleven Harvard Students, Grads Win Mellon Fellowships

Eleven current and former Harvard students were announced winners of the 1998 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in Humanistic Studies last Friday.

Harvard had more fellowship recipients than any of the 54 other institutions represented among the Mellon Fellows. Yale University logged the second most student winners, with eight recipients, and Dartmouth University had the third most recipients with four awards.

Six of the Harvard winners are recent graduates, and five are currently seniors, including Noah I. Dauber, Hsuan L. Hsu, Adam J. Levitin, David E. Petrain and Jason D. Williamson. Dauber and Levitin are Crimson editors.

Award winners were selected from a pool of 750 applicants, according to the Mellon Foundation.

Designed to help promising students prepare for careers in teaching and scholarship in humanistic studies, the Mellon Fellowship provides tuition for the first year of a Ph. D. Program in the United States or Canada, and includes a stipend of $14,000.

The fellowships have been awarded for 16 years by The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Funding for the program is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has committed over $63 million dollars during the past 15 years.

After submitting an essay and three letters of recommendation, all applicants were interviewed at Harvard, according to Petrain.

The application process was "nervewracking," he said.

"Every night I would come back to Eliot [House] with baited breath," Petrain continued. "On Thursday there was a dishearteningly thin envelope, but it was good news and I celebrated for the rest of the afternoon."

Petrain, a classics concentrator, is now deciding between Harvard or Brown for graduate school.

Levitin agreed on the stressful nature of the application process.

"Getting the letters of recommendation in on time probably cost me some hair, " he said.

Levitin plans to pursue graduate studies in modern Eastern Europe and Jewish history next fall at Columbia.

The Harvard Mellon Fellows' fields of study range from political philosophy to musicology.

The most popular intended graduate discipline for all 97 winners was history, with 29 winners. That was followed by English, which logged 19 winners.

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation operates a number of other programs aside from the Mellon Fellowships, all of which are designed to support excellence in American education.

The foundation is particularly focused on "improving the status and representation of minority groups and women at all levels of education", foundation Director Alvin Kernan said in a press release.

Forty-seven out of 97 winners were women, and nine African-American and three Hispanic winners made up 12 percent of this year's Fellows, according to the foundation.

Carrie E. Benes '96, Tamara T. Chin '97, David S. Kurnick '94, James B. Loeffler '96, Michael J. Puri '96 and Aaron J. Sachs '92 were also awarded fellowships.