April 25, 2005
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Laura Schlosnagle, a senior at Amherst College, has received a J. William Fulbright Fellowship to teach English in Germany next year. A graduate of Mayo High School, Schlosnagle is the daughter of Donald and Janet Schlosnagle of Rochester, Minn.

Recalling a family camping trip on Lake Superior as a child, Schlosnagle wrote in her application that "though space in the packs was limited and my father had to carry heavy equipment, he bought along The Lord of the Rings in three hardcover volumes." She learned early to "value literature and the art of language," and writes that teaching in Germany will "bring together several harmonious, but currently rather isolated, facets of my interests and goals."

Schlosnagle is an accomplished musician, an oboist who has also soloed with the Amherst College Orchestra and took up the German language at Amherst, in part to better understand scores and libretti. She studied Arthurian literature at the University of Bristol (England) the second semester of her junior year, and spent the preceding summer in Germany with Projekt Grosser Grenzverkehr, an initiative that strives to introduce young people in rural areas of the former German Democratic Republic to western ways and combat right-wing extremism.

At Amherst College Schlosnagle's major areas of study are English and German studies. After her Fulbright Schlosnagle hopes to attend law school and specialize in international law, with an emphasis on German politics and economics.

Congress created the Fulbright Program in 1946 to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges. Senator J. William Fulbright, sponsor of the legislation, viewed scholarship as an alternative to armed conflict. Today the Fulbright Program, the federal government's premier scholarship program, funded by an annual Congressional appropriation and contributions from other participating countries, allows Americans to study or conduct research in more than 100 nations.

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