IRVINE : 2 UCI Seniors Win Mellon Fellowships

Two UC Irvine seniors have been awarded highly competitive fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, university officials announced.

The fellowship winners are Georgina Dodge, a former Navy technician whose interest in literature was sparked while studying electrical engineering at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, and Jonathan Kaplan, a philosophy major who is interested in the nature of knowledge itself.

They are among 99 students selected to receive the prestigious fellowships from among 2,258 candidates in the United States and Canada, according to the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which administers the Mellon Fellows in the Humanities program.

The fellowships will provide Kaplan and Dodge with cash stipends of $11,500 to cover tuition and fees for their first year of graduate school. They are also eligible for financial support in their second year of studies, depending on their academic standing. Mellon fellows who pursue doctoral degrees within five years also are eligible for stipends while they prepare their dissertations.

Dodge, 30, describes herself as an “Air Force brat” who served as a technician in the Navy while stationed in Japan. After leaving the service in 1985, she began studying at the community college in Huntington Beach.

“I was working on an electrical engineering degree when I signed up for a literature class as a requirement,” Dodge recalled. “I realized then how much I absolutely love literature. Looking back, I always have. I never watch television.”

Dodge, who lives in Westminster, was nominated for the Mellon fellowship by Margot Norris, a UCI professor of English and comparative literature. She is scheduled to receive a bachelor’s degree in English in June and plans to enter UCLA’s graduate English program, where she will concentrate on ethnic American literature and the Modernist era of the 1920s.

Dodge was also accepted in UCI’s graduate English program.

“It was a tough choice,” Dodge said. “But in academics, it’s frowned upon to attend graduate school where you earned your undergraduate degree.”

Kaplan, 21, was nominated for the Mellon fellowship by Alan Nelson, associate professor of philosophy at UCI, for his promise in the study and theory of the nature of knowledge. Kaplan, of West Los Angeles, will get his bachelor’s degree in June. He plans to enter Stanford University’s graduate philosophy program in the fall.