NEWS

Local angles: Bakersville, Burnsville,
Chapel Hill, Durham; Jacksonville, Fla.

UNC graduates Alison Greene, Jenny Stepp win valuable, competitive Mellon Fellowships

By STEPHANIE GUNTER and L.J. TOLER
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Alison Collis Greene and Jennifer Royce Stepp, graduates of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have won two of 94 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in Humanistic Studies awarded nationwide from among 687 applicants.

The fellowship covers tuition and fees for the first year of graduate school and provides a $17,500 stipend for living expenses. The fellowships, awarded annually, are designed to help exceptionally promising students prepare for careers of teaching and scholarship in the humanities. Funding is from 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.

More than one winner at one university is not unusual, said Sue Lloyd-Stacewicz of the Wilson Foundation, but it almost always occurs only at Ivy League schools.

Both Carolina winners will enroll in doctoral programs this fall. Greene, 25, of Bakersville will take religious studies at Yale University. Stepp, 23, of Jacksonville, Fla., will study political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Both aim to become college professors.

Greene, the daughter of Larry Joe and Margaret Greene of 1123 Sam Greene Road in Burnsville, graduated from UNC in 2001 with a 3.77 grade-point-average and a double major in religious studies and anthropology. She attended on a Morehead Scholarship, a full, four-year merit award that also funds four summer learning and service experiences. She was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s highest academic honor society for college students.

Greene won two major prizes in religious studies: a departmental award to the undergraduate with the best research paper, and the Bernard Boyd Memorial Prize, one of UNC’s top academic awards. The prize honors the senior religious studies major named most outstanding in academic achievement.

One of Greene’s papers resulted from research on the Free Church of Scotland, a small Presbyterian denomination on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. Her senior honors thesis profiled the Baptist Church in her native Mitchell County.

After graduating, Greene worked in Arkansas for Teach For America, a national program that recruits recent, high-achieving college graduates to teach in rural and inner-city schools for two years. Now she works at MDC, a nonprofit think tank in Chapel Hill that seeks to expand opportunity and reduce poverty in the South.

Stepp, the daughter of Joe and Susan Stepp of 4373 Heaven Trees Road in Jacksonville, graduated from UNC in 2002 with a 3.87 grade-point-average. She majored in political science, minored in English and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa; the Order of the Golden Fleece, UNC’s highest honorary society; and a political science honor society.

She worked at The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper, and won a fellowship from the political science department to attend a conference on the presidency in Washington, D.C. Stepp founded and edited Boiling Point, a progressive magazine produced by students.

Until recently, she worked for the New Democracy Project in New York City, an urban affairs public policy institute that seeks to promote democratic participation, economic fairness and social justice. Stepp is spending this summer in Durham.

Stepp had wanted a career in magazine writing. She switched to academia because of Dr. Susan Bickford, a UNC associate professor of political science. "She helped me determine what I value," Stepp said. Once someone asked Stepp: "If you could have anyone’s job in the world, whose would it be? "The more I thought about it, the more I realized it would be Susan Bickford’s," Stepp said.

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Contacts: Greene, 919-968-4531, ext. 19, agreene@mdcinc.org; Stepp, 919-401-1193, steppjenny@yahoo.com

News Services contact: L.J. Toler, 919-962-8589