News Release

Local angles: Cary, Calabasas, Calif.

Erin Sullivan of Cary, who graduated from UNC with highest honors last May, has won a postgraduate scholarship from the Fulbright Commission to study in the United Kingdom. Only 11 students nationwide won the honor.

Sullivan, an English major, will leave Monday (Sept. 20) for the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Fulbright will pay tuition and living expenses for one year, long enough to complete a master’s degree in Shakespeare studies.

"We can’t afford to forget the power of an intellect like Shakespeare’s," Sullivan says. "I want to spend my life cultivating his presence in our society."

Sullivan is the daughter of Marla Spencer and Rick Sullivan of Cary. Nominated by Carolina last year for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, Sullivan was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. Her undergraduate years were funded entirely by merit-based scholarships, including those from the Cary Kiwanis Club and GlaxoSmithKline.

Sullivan’s essay on Thomas Wolfe was published in the Thomas Wolfe Review, a professional literary journal; she won $1,000 from the Thomas Wolfe Society for further research. She created a 30-minute audio and photography piece about low-income neighborhoods that was part of an exhibit last winter at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

For more on the scholarships, visit http://www.fulbright.co.uk/awards/us/recentfulbrighters/index.html

###

Joshua A. Guthman, a UNC graduate student in history, has received one of just 28 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships awarded this year by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation of Princeton, N.J.

The fellowships support doctoral candidates in their last year of dissertation work, providing a $17,500 stipend. Awarded this year to candidates at 15 U.S. institutions, the fellowships support students whose dissertations will concern religious and ethical issues.

Guthman, the son of David and Caren Guthman of Calabasas, Calif., plans a dissertation titled "What I Am ‘Tis Hard to Know: Primitive Baptists and the Shaping of the Protestant Self in Antebellum America." He specializes in American history.

Previously he has won honors including an Archie K. Davis Fellowship from the North Caroliniana Society, a UNC history department research fellowship and a research grant from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South.

For more on the Newcombe Fellowships, visit www.woodrow.org/newcombe.

- 30 -

For a photo of Sullivan, visit http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/students/rhodes/2003/sullivan_erin.jpg

Contact: L.J. Toler, 962-8589