News Release

Six students at The Johns Hopkins University have been awarded the opportunity to study abroad during the 2006-2007 academic year, thanks to two prestigious awards administered by the Institute of International Education.

Three graduating seniors and two graduate students will study abroad as Fulbright Scholars. A third graduate student earned a scholarship known as the DAAD from the German Academic Exchange Service.

Created in 1946, the Fulbright Program aims to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries through the exchange of people, knowledge and skills. The program awards approximately 1,000 grants annually and currently operates in more than 140 countries. Successful U.S. applicants use their grants to undertake self-designed programs in a broad range of disciplines including the social sciences, business, communication, performing arts, physical sciences, engineering and education.

DAAD, which stands for Deutscher Akademischer Austausch-dienst, is a publicly funded independent organization of higher education institutions in Germany. The association promotes international academic relations and cooperation by offering programs primarily for students and faculty but also for administrators and others in higher education.

Five students have been named Fulbright scholars:

Warner Brown, 22, will travel to Shanghai, called the "City of the Future," to study how the city's civic identity is represented in visual culture. Brown will examine the advertising and package and product design displayed in the city and assess how advertisers tailor commercial art to localized taste and culture. The Fulbright grant will allow Brown to continue research begun last summer in Shanghai with a grant from Johns Hopkins. (See www.jhu.edu/gazette/2006/13mar06/13pura2.html for information on Brown s project.) Brown plans to continue research of Shanghai in graduate school. He will receive his bachelor's degree in history next week.

Teresa Cribelli, 36, who is pursuing a doctorate in Latin American history, will travel to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to study how Brazilians from 1850 to 1889 conceived of modernization in terms of their own unique needs and circumstances. Cribelli will study 19th-century newspapers, reports on public work projects and government documents at institutions that include Brazil's National Library and National Archives. She also will work with Brazilian historians "to open a path to a shared reconsideration of Brazil's past," she said. Cribelli earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Colorado at Denver and her master's degree at the University of New Mexico.

Irene Kim, 22, will travel in July to South Korea on a one-year teaching assistantship in English as a foreign language. The scholarship will allow Kim a chance to satisfy both her passion for teaching and her desire as a first-generation Korean-American for a deeper appreciation and understanding of her family's culture. Kim says her prior teaching experiences as a resident adviser, tutor in biology and writing, and General Education Development certification tutor in the Baltimore City Detention Center will serve her well as a Fulbright scholar. After her return from South Korea, Kim plans to enroll in medical school to pursue a career as a physician and professor. Kim will receive a bachelor's degree in molecular and cellular biology next week.

Caitlin Kunkel, 21, will travel to Indonesia to teach English to Indonesian high school students. As an aspiring writer, Kunkel also plans to speak with survivors of the devastating December 2004 tsunami and write about their experiences. Kunkel will receive a bachelor's degree next week from the university's Writing Seminars. Upon her return from Indonesia, she plans to pursue a master of fine arts degree in creative writing.

Patrick Leland, 33, is a doctoral candidate in philosophy who will travel to Germany to study the contributions of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant to recent philosophical accounts of linguistic meaning. Many philosophers over the past century have asserted that the meanings of words depend on how people use those words in speech. Leland believes Kant's contributions to this account of meaning have gone largely unrecognized. He will travel to Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, to research and consult German scholars and archive materials. A graduate of Carson-Newman College, Leland holds master's degrees in philosophy from Northern Illinois University and Johns Hopkins. (Leland also earned a DAAD scholarship, but declined it in order to pursue his studies through the Fulbright program.)

Annemarie Catania, 30, will be headed to Marburg, Germany, for six months with a DAAD scholarship. She will further her doctoral dissertation in the Classics Department analyzing the imagery on Roman sarcophagi. Using the photo archive at the Sarkophag-Corpus, Catania will study the scenes of festive processions and banquets carved or sculpted into marble coffins. Though Catania says there is an ongoing scholarly debate about whether to read religious significance into the symbolism used in the elaborate carvings, she is approaching the sarcophagi from another angle, choosing instead to examine the connection between revelry and death that is reflected throughout ancient Roman society. A graduate of St. John's College, Catania holds a bachelor's degree in liberal arts. She anticipates earning her doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins in fall 2007.

Christopher Kovalchick, 22, also won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Germany but declined the award in favor of a full fellowship for graduate study in aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. Kovalchick also was awarded a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship from the Department of Defense. Kovalchick will receive a degree in engineering mechanics from the Whiting School of Engineering and a degree in violin performance from the Peabody Institute next week.

For more information on the Fulbright and DAAD programs, go to www.iie.org (for Fulbright) or http://www.daad.org/about/daad.htm (for DAAD).