May 5, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Alana Laudone, a senior at Amherst College, has been awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship for postgraduate study in China. Laudone, a graduate of Glastonbury High School, is the daughter of Vincent and Katharyn Laudone of South Glastonbury, Conn.
A graduate in Mandarin Chinese of the Rassias Accelerated Language Program at Dartmouth College, where she also taught for three summers, Laudone has studied Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst. She also will receive a Five College certificate in international relations in May. In China next year at Xinjiang University, she plans to explore the cultural dynamic of the Uighur people, a mainly Islamic Turkic ethnic group. She asked in her Fulbright proposal, “How does a small minority culture survive in the face of such a dominant majority culture” as the Han Chinese?
At Amherst, Laudone has chaired Youth Action International, a fund-raising group that focuses on African issues, and has been active in the Asian Students Association. She also has worked in the college archives, the library archives, the dining hall and as a tutor. She sang with the Amherst Women’s Chorus and the Sabrinas, an a capella singing group.
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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