NEWS

By DEE REID
College of Arts and Sciences

CHAPEL HILL -- Two faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have received prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowships to study in Berlin during the coming academic year.

This was especially good news for both recipients as Dr. Kathryn Starkey, assistant professor of Germanic languages and Dr. Michael Minion, associate professor of mathematics will marry later this month before heading to Germany this summer.

Starkey specializes in medieval and early modern cultures. She is interested in visual quality of medieval narratives, particularly the relationship between word and image in the secular culture of the Middle Ages. She will spend the coming year at Humboldt University in Berlin researching 13th-century German secular manuscript illustration for her second book project.

Starkey received a master's degree in Germanic linguistics and a doctorate in German literature at the University of California at Berkeley in 1998, when she joined the UNC faculty.

Minion is considered one of the top researchers of his generation in the field of computational fluid dynamics. He will study German language for eight weeks in Dresden this summer, then begin his 10-month Berlin fellowship at the Freie University Oct. 1. There he will study mathematical and computational methods for modeling combustion. Minion received his doctorate in mathematics at UC-Berkeley in 1994. He came to Carolina in 1997.

Despite overlapping at Berkeley, the two first met in Chapel Hill.

The fellowships, designed for scholars under age 40, are awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany.

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Contact: Dee Reid, (919) 843-6339