History student receives prestigious Mellon scholarship

Sarah E. Klimenko, a senior in history and political science, is one of 98 winners nationwide of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in Humanistic Studies competition, the only national humanities graduate award.

Nearly 800 of the nation’s top humanities students competed for this year’s Mellon fellowships. The one-year fellowship award includes payment of all graduate school tuition and fees and a $14,500 stipend.

Fellows may attend any accredited graduate school of arts and sciences in the United States or Canada, studying in such disciplines as English, history, philosophy, foreign languages and literature, art history, classics, music history and theory, cultural anthropology and linguistics.

Klimenko, from Western Springs, Ill., is enrolled in the College of Letters and Science. She is a member of the exclusive Phi Beta Kappa honor society for liberal arts students. She is writing a senior thesis on the response in British newspapers to the American Declaration of independence.

Outside the classroom, she tutors students in writing. She was a junior fellow at library of congress, manuscript division, where she coordinated an Internet exhibit on President Lincoln’s role as commander in chief.

Klimenko, who graduates this spring, plans to pursue a doctorate in history at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on early American history and the history of American thought.

“I would like to be a professor of history so that I could not only research and write American history but also teach it,” she says.