KU News Release

KU student earns highly competitive grant to study in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia

Alphilde Dick

LAWRENCE — If a biography tells a reader who a person really is, what do the collective biographies of war-torn nations say about national identity? Alphilde Dick, a University of Kansas master’s student from Perry, will tackle that question in libraries in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia thanks to a highly competitive grant.

Dick won a six-month, $6,000 Title VIII Southeastern Europe Research Grant from the American Council of International Education, a program of the U.S. State Department. The grant was open not only to graduate students, but to undergraduates and professors as well. She will travel to Zagreb, Croatia; Sarajevo, Bosnia; and Belgrade, Serbia, from August through December to study biographies and autobiographies from authors in the region.

Dick, a graduate of Perry-Lecompton High School, heard about the grant and worked with her adviser, Stephen M. Dickey, associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures, to form a proposal.

“It occurred to me that I had read a lot of literature that was autobiographical, or semi-autobiographical from the region, but there wasn’t much scholarship on the topic,” Dick said.

For the first half of the 1990s, the south Slavic region of Europe was engulfed in war. The War of Secession pitted former Yugoslavian states against one another in several years of conflict. Dick will study what biographical literature from 1995 on reflects about national identity. She’ll study at the University of Zagreb, University of Sarajevo and University of Belgrade.

“I think biography and autobiography reflect how we see ourselves, or how the author sees the subject, and looking at this particular period I hope to find out what that says about their national identity. I’m wondering if the genre proliferates like it does in America, where nearly everyone can write memoirs or an autobiography. If that’s the case, what does popular biography say?”

Upon her return, Dick will write a 20- to 30-page synopsis of her findings. She’ll also likely use it as the basis for her master’s thesis. She expects to complete her master’s in 2010.

Dick is the daughter of Gretchen Byer of Olathe and Michael Rees of Lecompton.

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