News Release

Local angle: Winston-Salem;
Atlanta, Baltimore

For photo availability, see page end of story.

By MARY CATHERINE HENDRIX
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL – John W. Steen IV, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has won one of 91 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in Humanistic Studies awarded nationwide this spring, chosen from a pool of 648 applicants.

The fellowship covers tuition and fees for the first year of graduate school and provides a $17,500 stipend for living expenses. Steen, the son of Warren and Kathy Steen of Winston-Salem, will seek a doctorate in comparative literature at Emory University in Atlanta.

The fellowships, awarded annually, are designed to help exceptionally promising students prepare for careers of teaching and scholarship in the humanities.

Steen said the award will help him realize his goal of becoming a university professor of comparative literature.

"Literature confronts the problem of relating to others in world unlike ourselves," he said. "I’m grateful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting the work of finding new ways to talk about and act in the real world."

Steen, an English major, has a grade-point-average of 3.83. He will graduate with highest honors on May 15. His main interests are modernist poetry and critical theory.

Through UNC, he received a Kimball King Award for his thesis research on W.B. Yeats and a 1938 Witten Travel Award to study in Granada, Spain. There, Steen studied Spanish poetry, incorporating some of the material into his honors thesis, "Memories from Ruin."

As a board member of the Comparative Literature Organization for Undergraduate Discussion at UNC, Steen has organized two film series: "Border Crossings" in 2004 and "Life Screenings, Screening Lives" in 2005. He also co-curated a 2004 exhibit at UNC’s Ackland Art Museum.

"John Steen has a great love of literary texts and the poetic theory that informs them," said Dr. George Lensing, director of the UNC Office of Distinguished Scholarships. "His professors describe him as the equivalent of an advanced graduate student in his maturity and sophistication as a reader. He is certainly one of our most distinguished senior English majors this year; he has a brilliant career in literary studies before him."

Steen is a board member of the Association of English Majors and has been an active member of the UNC chapter of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

A transfer student to UNC, Steen was also very involved at Johns Hopkins University, where he started his undergraduate career. He was a board member of the Programa Salud Latino Healthcare Initiative and a medical interpretation volunteer at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore. He also contributed poetry to Zeniada, the university’s undergraduate literary magazine.

Funding for the fellowships is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City, named in honor of the treasury secretary for the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations, 1921-32. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation of Princeton, N.J., administers the Mellon fellowships.

For more information on the fellowships, visit the Web site http://www.woodrow.org/mellon/.

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To download a photo of Steen, click on http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/students/steen.jpg

Fellowship contacts: John Steen, 919-914-2355, eleven@email.unc.edu; Dr. George Lensing, 919-962-4053, lensing@email.unc.edu

News Services contacts: L.J. Toler, 962-8589