Jan. 14, 1998 Contact Ross West (541) 346-2060 Source: Karen Kelsky (541) 346-5130 EUGENE--What happens when women from Japan leave their own culture to live and study in the West, then return to their homeland altered by the experience? This is the question that Karen Kelsky examined in her doctoral dissertation while in the anthropology program at the University of Hawaii. Kelsky, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon since fall of 1996, recently received two fellowships which will allow her to devote her full-time attention to writing a book based on her dissertation work. The working title of the book is "The Cosmopolitan Woman: Gender, Race and Internationalism In and Out of Japan." Kelsky received offers to publish the book from two university presses and is currently negotiating contract details. The highly competitive fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), valued at $30,000, will free Kelsky from her teaching duties for a year to pursue the writing project. She plans to spend one term of the year at the University of Washington as an affiliate of the Rockefeller Program in Critical Asian Studies. Out of 513 applicants for the NEH fellowship, only 85 received the award this year; of these, social scientists received only eight of the awards, and anthropologists, only four. "I am absolutely ecstatic," she says. "I applied for a number of grants, but I never imagined I would get the prestigious NEH award on my first try." Steadman Upham, UO vice provost for research, responded to news of Kelsky's award by saying, "In times of vastly reduced funding for the NEH, this is a truly significant achievement." Compounding her success, Kelsky also won a fellowship from the University of Oregon Center for the Humanities. In addition to the use of office space and resources of the Oregon Humanities Center, the award will free Kelsky from her teaching load during the fall term of the 1998-99 school year to devote full time to both writing and planning her next major research project after the completion of her book. Kelsky will present three public lectures on her topic--one each in Portland, Bend and Eugene--as part of this year's Freeman Lecture series, "Confronting Japan." The Freeman lectures are organized by the UO's Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and include several other speakers from the University of Oregon. Kelsky's lectures will take place during the first week of May. -30- #G-7320/Local,OrSci