NEWS

Local angles: Apex, Charlotte, Morrisville,
Winston-Salem; Kendall Park, N.J.

CHAPEL HILL -- Five University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students won Class of 1938 Summer Study Abroad Fellowships to complete study projects of their own design in other countries this summer.

Their topics range from alternatives to the criminal justice system to Bolivia’s tuberculosis epidemic, excellence in teaching and Spanish poetry.

The fellows, who received $3,500 each, are rising seniors David Gray of 6400 Sardis Road, Charlotte and Roslyn Johnson of 6 Cardinal Ct., Kendall Park, N.J.; rising junior Megan White of 440 Magdala Place, Apex; and rising sophomore Naman Shah of 511 Hickorywood Blvd., Morrisville.

Rising senior John Steen IV of Winston-Salem won this year’s $3,100 Charles and Margaret Witten Travel Award, made possible by an endowment created by the Wittens of Columbia, S.C., class of 1938 members.

Since 1975, an endowment created by UNC’s class of 1938 has funded independent projects abroad by UNC students each year. Members of the class, who lived through and lost friends to World War II, created the endowment to help foster international understanding and promote world peace.

The program is administered by the UNC International Center, which each year coordinates a committee to select finalists. Selection is based on quality of applicants’ proposals, financial need and seriousness of academic purpose, said Diana Levy, center assistant director.

Each spring, representatives from the center, the study abroad office, members of the class of 1938 and former fellowship winners interview semifinalists and name finalists. Class of 1938 members and former fellows choose the recipients.

Gray, a philosophy major, will conduct research at the Australian National University’s Centre for Restorative Justice in Canberra, Australia. His goal, he wrote in his scholarship application, is to explore restorative justice as an alternative to punishment in criminal proceedings.

The concept holds that "appropriate societal response to crime should be the restoration of victims, offenders and communities," Gray wrote. He finds the U.S. criminal justice system ineffective. "I hope my research and writing now, in graduate school and beyond will help erode prejudices keeping the current system in place and promote more just, humane and effective institutional practices."

A disc jockey on UNC’s student radio station WXYC, Gray is proficient in German grammar and a member of the philosophy club.

Johnson, a health policy and administration major, will analyze public policies at the Institute of Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She also will research access to public and private hospitals in Argentina.

"The report I generate will help the institute evaluate the hospitals and make recommendations to government and non-governmental agencies," Johnson wrote in her application.

At Carolina, she has been active in student government, the Relay for Life fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society and the Campus Y, a student group working for social justice and positive race relations. She speaks Spanish and has intermediate knowledge of French and written Spanish.

Biochemistry major Naman Shah will travel to a small Bolivian village and work on an irrigation system designed to further sustainable development. While there, Shah will be affiliated with Save the Children, a Connecticut-based nonprofit that works to help needy children. He wrote that the Campus Y group Hunger Lunch contributed $7,000 to the project.

Shah also plans to research Bolivia’s tuberculosis epidemic and determine whether World Health Organization guidelines are being implemented. At UNC, Shah has been active in the APPLES service learning program, a volunteer in Hispanic outreach for the Orange Water and Sewer Authority and a participant in the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service last January.

White, an elementary education major focusing on social studies, will teach in a school for children aged 5 to 15 in Accra, Ghana, from June 2 through July 31, "so that I can be the best teacher that I can be." She mainly will teach English and math, but also science, social studies, life skills, art and physical education. "I will take the steps I can … to expose my students to the arts, technology and foreign language," White wrote.

She is a North Carolina Teaching Fellow, with an annual scholarship to Carolina from the state in exchange for teaching four years after graduation in a North Carolina public school or a U.S. government school in the state. At UNC, she has been active in the Campus Y, Relay for Life, the Inversions Modern Dance Company and the UNC Dance Marathon, a charity fund-raiser.

Steen, an English major, will study the work of poet Federico Garcia Lorca in Granada, Spain. "I want to study his work in relation to the Spanish Civil War, a time of intense violence that killed nearly half a million Spaniards," he wrote. "How did Lorca, an artist who kept apart from politics, respond to the violence that threatened and eventually took his own life?"

Steen hopes also to study early Spanish poetry and learn the Arabic-Spanish dialect in which is it written, Mozarabe. The dialect brought Muslims and Christians together at a time when violence between the groups was still encouraged, Steen wrote. He has been active in groups opposing the death penalty, the Campus Y, Association of English Majors and a comparative literature discussion group.

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Contact: Diana Levy, 919-962-5661, dmlevy@email.unc.edu