News from
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Office of Communications
Stanhope Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264Contact: Mary Caffrey (609) 258-5748
Date: December 14, 1998
Princeton Seniors Win Canadian Rhodes, Marshall Scholarships
Princeton, N.J. -- Two members of the Class of 1999 have received prestigious Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships for two years of study in Great Britain beginning in October 1999. Sophie Dumont, of Saint Agapit, Lotbiniere, Quebec received one of 11 Rhodes Scholarships awarded to Canadian students, and Richard Johnston of Spartanburg, S.C., is a winner of the Marshall Scholarship.
The Rhodes scholarships, which fund study at Oxford University, were established in 1902 by British entrepreneur and philanthropist Cecil Rhodes. Thirty-two students from the United States and approximately three dozen others from countries of the former British Commonwealth receive the scholarships. The Marshall Scholarship is awarded annually by the British Embassy to recognize academic accomplishment and leadership potential. Forty American students each year receive funding for two or three years of study at the British institution of their choice. The British government began the program in 1953 in appreciation for the American relief provided after World War II via the Marshall Plan, named in honor of U. S. General George Marshall.
Dumont, whose parents are Nicole Turcotte and Claude Dumont, is a physics major who plans to continue her physics studies at Oxford University. Johnston, the son of Harry and Caroline Johnston, plans to earn a master's degree in 20th century literature in his first year at the University of Sussex. In his second year, he plans to earn a master's in education.
Sophie Dumont
Sophie Dumont almost didn't come to Princeton. She had learned about the university from a college guide and had visited the campus with her parents during a trip to the United States. But when she received early acceptance, her parents hesitated. A call from her father's college classmate, whose daughter is Jean Drouin '95, helped convinced them. "He said 'You would be crazy not to let her come.' "
Now, her brother Charles is a Princeton sophomore and her brother Louis is applying to be a freshman here in the fall of 1999.
Dumont is interested in both physics and molecular biology and is writing a senior thesis in biophysics under the direction of Professor of Physics and Molecular Biology Stanislaw Leibler. She said she chose physics as her major because of the high quality of the teaching and the small number of students who love the field. During the past two summers, Dumont has done research on bacterial chemotaxis and thermotaxis, examining how different kinds of behavior in bacteria respond to chemical stimuli. She is especially interested in how temperature changes behavior. Dumont is planning a career in research.
The interview for the Rhodes was intense. Because Dumont was competing for one of two scholarships for Quebec residents, questions were in both English and French. Questions covered topics she had studied at Princeton, current events, and life in her small hometown, where most people do not attend college and almost no one has heard of Princeton. "It's a rural town," she said. "At least four generations of my family have lived in the same house."
Richard Johnston
Johnston comes from Spartanburg, S.C., a small city that has historically been a center for the textile industry but today is seeing its mills close one by one. Those mills, the town, and Johnston's "strange relatives" are the material he taps for his poetry, which he began writing seriously as a high school senior.
For his senior thesis, Johnston is writing a series of "very Southern" narrative poems under the direction of Yusef Komunyakaa, professor in the Council of the Humanities. (Komunyakaa, the 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, draws on his own experiences growing up in Bogalusa, La.) Johnston will write about his grandfather, Eugene Brown, who flew the mail into Spartanburg during the 1930s, and about the history of Anderson's Mill, near his home. "The poem is about rust, the shell of what used to be there, suspended in rust," he said.
Johnston also speaks Latin, having honed his skills during an eight-week summer program of intense reading, writing and speaking with the Rev. Reginald Foster, a Carmelite monk who translates Vatican documents into Latin. During his Marshall interview, Johnston was asked to do a sight translation of a Latin poem by Catullus.
He credits a high school English teacher, Bill Pell, with encouraging him to write poetry, hopes to teach creative writing himself, either at the high school or university level. When asked about his favorite writers, he mentions John Keats and T.S. Eliot -- both subjects of junior papers -- Milton and James Dickey. Eliot came up in his Marshall interview in Atlanta, when he was asked to recite from "The Wasteland." And so did Dickey.
Johnston was asked what poem he would recommend to the selection committee when members returned home. "I drew a blank," Johnston said. "Finally I said James Dickey's 'The Sheep Child.' Dickey says there is a legend among farmboys that men and sheep can produce progeny. The poem is narrated by a sheep-child in a jar of formaldehyde, who died shortly after birth clutching a hoof in his hand, because sheep-children can't be allowed to live."
At some point Johnston realized he had selected a poem about bestiality. One woman on the panel was wide-eyed as he went on, but another interviewer said, "Richard, I am from Alabama and you're from South Carolina. I understand completely."