Maryland's First Beinecke Scholar: Weinfei Zhou

Wenfei Zhou, a junior English major, has just been named a 2011 Beinecke Scholar.

The Beinecke Scholarship program is a prestigious and highly selective national award limited to a select list of nominating institutions composed of leading liberal arts colleges and first-tier private and public universities. Participating institutions nominate one candidate annually; this was Maryland’s first year as a nominating institution.

The Beinecke Scholarship “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 in the arts, humanities and social sciences.” This award, which is made to juniors with serious plans for doctoral studies, provides $4,000 immediately prior to entering graduate school and an additional $30,000 while attending graduate school.

Wenfei plans to pursue a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and is presently studying abroad in France. He is the recipient of a 2011 Maryland Summer Scholars award which will support research on nineteenth-century literary representations of automatons and clockworks in Germany, Switzerland and France. His application was supported by outstanding letters from several of his mentors: Prof. Jianmei Liu (Department of Asian and East European Languages and Literatures), Prof. Ralph Bauer (Department of English and Comparative Literature) and Prof. Orrin Wang (Department of English and Comparative Literature).

Beinecke Scholarship website: http://foundationcenter.org/grantmaker/beinecke/index.html

Beinecke Scholarship list of nominating institutions: http://foundationcenter.org/grantmaker/beinecke/nominating.html

Beinecke Scholarship Background information:

The Beinecke Scholarship Program was established in 1971 by the Board of Directors of The Sperry and Hutchinson Company to honor Edwin, Frederick, and Walter Beinecke. 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 in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Since 1975 the program has selected more than 470 college juniors from more than 100 different undergraduate institutions for support during graduate study at any accredited university.