June 13, 2000
Contact: Mary Jane Dunlap, University Relations, (785) 864-8853.
LAWRENCE--While scouting for a summer job before heading to graduate school, Jeffrey S. O'Neal, University of Kansas spring 2000 graduate from Lawrence, learned he was the winner of one of 85 national fellowships offered by the Mellon Foundation to encourage teaching careers in the humanities.
O'Neal, who received a bachelor's degree in English at KU, will enroll in a Ph.D. program in English literature at Columbia University in New York City this fall. The fellowship provides about a $14,500 stipend in addition to paying full tuition and fees for one year of graduate study. Officials at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which announced the winners for 2000, said that the total worth of the fellowship for O'Neal would be about $40,000. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Princeton, N.J., administers the Mellon fellowship.
O'Neal is the 21st KU student to receive a Mellon fellowship since the program was established in 1982.
Chancellor Robert Hemenway, who taught O'Neal as a freshman, said, "We congratulate Jeff on being named a Mellon Fellow. His successful pursuit of this national scholarship is an example of the top quality students that KU attracts and encourages. The Mellon fellowships encourage our brightest and best to serve the next generation of college students."
O'Neal's long-range goal is to teach at the university level, specializing in American literature from 1900 to 1945.
Hemenway taught O'Neal in an introduction to American literature class. O'Neal continued the American literature course in the second semester, taught by Mary Klayder, lecturer and then also the associate director of KU's Honors Program.
In the second-semester course, O'Neal became intrigued with the history of literary publishing and its impact on literature and art, particularly 20th century African-American literature. He won an undergraduate research grant to focus on the special problems that minorities have had gaining access to literary outlets. His project, "Literary production and criticism during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s," was one of seven presented to Kansas Board of Regents members when they visited KU in October 1999.
O'Neal was one of 31 central region semifinalists interviewed in Chicago on March 4. The central region includes Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming.
He is the son of Lynn O'Neal, 2411 Princeton Blvd., and Judy Lane O'Neal, 5010 Congressional Way.