May 3, 2007
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Greg Hedin, a recent graduate of Amherst College, has been awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship to study early German Romanticism at the Georg-August Universität in Göttingen in Germany. Hedin is the son of Greg and Mary Hedin of Urbana, Ill., and a graduate of St. Joseph-Ogden High School in St. Joseph, Ill. He plans to enroll later in a Ph.D. program in German literature.
Hedin, who graduated from Amherst this past January with a double major in English and German, also studied for a semester at the Georg-August Universität in his junior year. It was then, and in his summer study at the Freie Universität Berlin, that Hedin refined his fascination with literary self-reference, influenced by the essays and the life of the critic Walter Benjamin. As he wrote in his Fulbright proposal, “the Romantic novel [represents] a development toward a more self-conscious literary style.” Hedin hopes to continue working on a current project, a study of German women of letters in the period and their “re-integration into the canon.”
Göttingen, he wrote, “lies in close proximity to the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar, as well as the Anna Amalia Bibliothek, which are two of the best resources in the world for the study of late 18th-century German literature.”
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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