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Redding lands merit fellowship worth $17,500 plus tuition, fees

By L.J. TOLER
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- James Patrick Redding, who will graduate Sunday (May 19) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has won one of 85 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in Humanistic Studies awarded nationwide this spring from among 775 applicants.

The fellowship covers tuition and fees for the first year of graduate school and provides a $17,500 stipend for living expenses. Redding, the son of James Lee Redding and Doris Ann Peeler Redding of 665 Grandview Drive, Concord, will seek a doctorate in Renaissance English literature at Yale University, where tuition is approximately $24,000 per year. Yale also will provide $5,500 in living expenses.

Redding said the award will be a great boost on his way toward realizing his goal: becoming a scholar and professor at a major university.

"I aim to become a scholar of the Renaissance in the spirit of my great Renaissance teachers here at UNC, John Headley in history and Reid Barbour and Jessica Wolfe in English," he said. "These are teachers who combine a passion for the classroom, an encyclopedic memory and well-respected scholarly publications in Renaissance intellectual history and literature."

Redding majored in English with a minor in history at UNC, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's top collegiate honor society, and made the dean's list all eight semesters. His grade-point-average is 3.9 in his major and 3.7 overall.

The Mellon Fellowships, awarded annually for 20 years, are designed to help exceptionally promising students prepare for careers of teaching and scholarship in the humanities. Funding is from the Andrews 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.

Redding will enroll at Yale in August, as will his fiance, 2001 UNC graduate Katie Reklis. The two will marry on June 22, then, after a short honeymoon, head to Germany, Italy and Greece for the summer to visit and study sites important to the Reformation.

Reklis has been "saving my pennies all year" to pay her way; Redding won a Frances L. Phillips Travel Scholarship, offered through UNC and funded by a bequest from the late Phillips, a member of Chapel Hill's Phillips family and a longtime editor for William and Morrow (publishing) of New York.

Redding also studied abroad in London, through a summer 1999 honors course, and last summer, through a Class of 1938 Travel Award, also from private donations and offered through UNC. Redding studied the relationship of Platonic philosophy to Florentine art, architecture and religious sites in Florence, Italy.

Last month, Redding won one of just 64 Chancellor's Awards recognizing excellence in undergraduate academic achievement and service, the Chi Omega Award for Scholarship and Leadership. The award honors the English student who is most outstanding in scholastic achievement and exemplary leadership.

Also in English, he won the James L. Whitfield Memorial Prize and the Kimball King Award, both for his honors thesis.

Founder of the UNC Poetry Symposium and the independent magazine The Last Generation, Redding also tutored in creative writing. Redding was poetry editor of the UNC student literary magazine, Cellar Door, and co-president of the Association of English Majors. He is a member of the Independent Defense Council, the UNC Philosophy Club and Masala, a student organization promoting multiculturalism.

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Photo URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/students/redding_james.jpg

Contact: Redding may be reached best via email to patrickredding@yahoo.com (lower case). By phone, he may be reached at 919-969-7545 through June 22 and afterward, via his family at 704-786-9534.