May 14, 1997 Contact John R. Crosiar (541) 346-3135 EUGENE--Four University of Oregon doctoral degree candidates are recipients of 1997 UO Doctoral Research Fellowships. Each award includes a $15,000 stipend and a UO tuition waiver. Graduate students Laura Clarke, physics; Alexis Easley, English; Stuart McElderry, history; and David Watters, linguistics, are this year's fellowship recipients. The fellowship stipends support exceptional, advanced doctoral degree candidates as they complete their research and write their dissertations. The fellowship program, a collaborative of the Graduate School and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, is designed to support outstanding doctoral students and promote excellence in research at the University of Oregon. The funding begins in the 1997 summer or fall quarter and is available to recipients for up to 12 months. Each year since the UO began the program in 1991, three to six UO doctoral candidates have received the doctoral research awards. The fellowships are available to eligible doctoral degree candidates in all academic disciplines at the university. The recipients must be entering their final year at the UO. Each department nominates one candidate for the fellowship, and a subcommittee of the UO Graduate Council evaluates the applications, in consultation with Steadman Upham, vice provost of research and dean of the Graduate School. Clarke, of Bozeman, Mont., is working on a dissertation titled "Transport Through Arrays of Ligand-Stabilized Metal Clusters." "Laura's research focuses on the electrical properties of samples made from gold clusters that contain only 55 atoms," says her adviser Martin Wybourne, UO professor of physics. Her work may help scientists discover how to control the flow of electricity through tiny, molecular-sized devices. Clarke also was honored in the past for her work as a Graduate Teaching Fellow. She received the 1995-96 Graduate Student Service Award and the 1994-95 GTF Teaching Excellence Award. Easley, of Anchorage, Alaska, is studying the largely anonymous contributions of women writers to Victorian periodicals with her dissertation, "Authorship, Gender and the Victorian Periodical Press, 1830-1860." The study of this almost forgotten material, says UO English professor Richard Stein, Easley's adviser, is a project that has brought Easley into some of the most important libraries of Britain and America. "What makes her work unique is the ability to combine considerable skills in old-fashioned literary research with wide knowledge of contemporary debates in literary history and theory," says Stein. Last year, Easley's sister Roxanne was also the recipient of an Oregon Doctoral Research Fellowship for her study of state decentralization in 19th-century Russia. McElderry, of Auburn, Calif., is working on a unique study titled "The Problem of the Color Line: Civil Rights and Racial Ideology in Portland, Oregon, 1930-1965." According to his adviser, UO history professor Quintard Taylor, McElderry's dissertation is the first study of the civil rights movement in Portland. Taylor says that McElderry's study looks at both black political activists and white liberals in Portland, and how their views on civil rights changed over time. "The subtext of all of this is the point at which the two groups began to diverge in the late 1960s," says Taylor. McElderry is Taylor's first Ph.D. student, and Taylor recruited him to attend the UO. "Stuart has just been an exemplary student," says Taylor. "He has risen above all of our expectations." Watters, of Springfield, Ore., has spent 30 years studying the Kham language, spoken by a remote rural population in Nepal. Watters' dissertation, says his adviser Scott DeLancey, linguistics professor, will be a grammar of the Kham language, which was completely unknown to the field of linguistics before Watters' work. "In the course of his work with the Kham," DeLancey says, "he has developed a writing system for the Kham community to use, and helped to create literacy materials so that the people can learn to read in their own language." -30- #H-2248/Hometowns/no