Junior Receives Prestigious Beinecke Scholarship for PhD
in Liberal Arts
Patrick Kennedy
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
|
By Amy Lunday Homewood
Patrick Kennedy, a junior from Watchung, N.J., has won
a prestigious Beinecke Scholarship, which defrays the cost
of a doctoral education in one of the traditional liberal
arts, with an emphasis on the humanities. He is one of 20
students nationwide to be selected this year for the
$32,000 award.
After completing his triple major in the
Writing
Seminars,
English and
History of Art at Johns Hopkins, Kennedy intends to use
his Beinecke Scholarship to pursue graduate studies in
English and the history of art, a path that he says will
strike a balance between research and a broad-based
humanistic discipline. Kennedy said he hopes to earn
concurrent degrees, completing a doctorate in American
literature while preparing for a second thesis in artistic
criticism.
"In a deep sense, my award is a credit to the Hopkins
faculty who encouraged me to foster my interests at the
most rigorous level possible," Kennedy said. "From the
middle of my freshman year, I have engaged in independent
liberal arts research. Along the way, close contact with
professors such as John Irwin and Jean McGarry of the
Writing Seminars enabled me to bridge my passions for
literary criticism and creative writing, while the Hopkins
Humanities Center and exceptional Art History faculty
helped me to appreciate my academic projects in an
expansive historical context. And in graduate classes with
experts like Michael Fried, I have encountered some of the
most extraordinary film, photography and criticism being
produced today. Guided by these professional examples, I
have made full use of the cultural resources that Hopkins
puts at my fingertips."
The Beinecke Scholarship is the latest of many
academic accolades earned by Kennedy, who holds a Hodson
Trust Scholarship, awarded by Johns Hopkins to fewer than
20 incoming freshmen and renewed each year on the basis of
academic and personal achievement, leadership and
contribution, and worth up to $24,000 a year. He also is a
member of the Gold Key International Honors Society and the
National Society of Collegiate Scholars.
As an undergraduate, Kennedy has pursued his
fascination with topics ranging from American Modernism to
19th-century European criticism to dissident postmodern art
in the Soviet Union by conducting independent research
through two programs at Johns Hopkins — the Woodrow
Wilson Undergraduate Research Fellowship (funding of up to
$10,000 over four years) and the
Provost's Undergraduate Research Award (up to $3,000
for a semester-long project). Last summer, the PURA grant
covered the cost of his first trip abroad — a
one-scholar revival of the European "grand tour" —
when he traveled through London, Venice, Florence, Paris
and other European cities to experience firsthand the
classical West that had captivated "the most potent
literary minds in generations past."
In addition to his research, Kennedy is active in a
number of literary pursuits, including writing for the
student newspaper,
The News-Letter, where he is a critic for film,
professional theater and fine art, and a columnist on
political philosophy and the humanities in American
society. Several pieces of his fiction have appeared in the
Writing Seminars' Thoroughfares literary magazine.
The Beinecke Scholarship Program was established in
1971 by the board of directors of the Sperry and Hutchinson
Co. to honor Edwin, Frederick and Walter Beinecke, brothers
who led the company for many years. The board created an
endowment to provide substantial scholarships for the
graduate education of young men and women of exceptional
promise. The program seeks to encourage and enable highly
motivated students to pursue opportunities available to
them and to be courageous in the selection of a graduate
course of study. Since 1975, the program has selected more
than 370 juniors from 97 different schools for support
during graduate study at any accredited university. Each
scholar receives $2,000 immediately prior to entering
graduate school and an additional $30,000 while attending.
The last Johns Hopkins student to receive the award was
Katherine L. McDonough, in 2005.
GO TO MAY 7, 2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
GO TO THE GAZETTE
FRONT PAGE.
|