Amanda Black(left) and H. Meg Orita(right), two graduate students in the musicology PhD program, have been awarded graduate fellowships in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Amanda Black was named to the first cohort of the Thomas S. Kenan Graduate Fellows in the College of Arts and Sciences, a program funded thanks to a generous gift from alumnus Thomas S. Kenan III (’59). This Kenan Graduate Fellowship is enables some of the most talented graduate students to be fully immersed in their scholarship and realize their potential as they work toward completion of their doctorates. Amanda says about being awarded the fellowship: “I am very honored to be among the first cohort of Kenan Graduate Fellows. This generous gift will be especially helpful for me this summer as I work on my dissertation project, examining gentrification, colonialism, and sound in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Thanks to the Department of Music, I always feel supported and mentored in my research and teaching!”
H. Meg Orita was nominated to the first cohort of the Druscilla French Graduate Fellows in the College of Arts and Sciences. The recipients of this fellowship have distinguished themselves both through excellent work as a student and exceptional contributions as a teacher or mentor to undergraduates in a classroom or research setting. This fellowship is made possible by a generous gift from UNC alumna, Dr. Druscilla French (B.A. ’71, M.A. ’78), who is a psychologist and critical mythologist. Meg is working toward a dissertation on Post-Feminist Teen Music in the late twentieth century. She says that “I am honored to be included in the first cohort of Druscilla French Fellows, an award that recognizes the work to which my peers and I dedicate ourselves in terms of teaching and research. Teaching is a big part of what brought me into academia, and I am grateful to Dr. French for her generous investment in graduate education here at UNC.”