Three in Journalism Department win
international fellowships
Emma Axt, a senior journalism and romance languages major from Edina, Minn., has won a Fulbright Fellowship to teach in Dijon, France for the 2008-09 academic year.
Hers is the third major international fellowship won by students and faculty in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications in the past month. Phylissa Mitchell, who is finishing a two-year visiting professorship, won a faculty Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine, and Mary Childs ’08, a business journalism major and a native of Richmond, was one of 50 students nationwide to be named a Thomas J. Watson Fellow.
Childs will travel to France, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, China, Brazil and Morocco to explore the countries and their people through portraiture. Mitchell, a graduate of the University of Virginia and Washington and Lee’s law school, has extensive experience in print and broadcast news, including at the network level. In Ukraine she will teach a comparative course on free-press constitutional guarantees, as well as courses in broadcast writing and public affairs.
Axt said she knew when she was 6 years old that she wanted to live in France and teach English. She has been working toward that goal ever since.
“You don’t realize how driven you can be until you find a goal that you really want to achieve that badly,” she said.
George Bent, professor of art and the university’s student Fulbright program coordinator, described Axt as a diligent and conscientious student.
“The nice thing about Emma is that she’ll act on suggestions and go three steps beyond what you’ve asked her to do,” Bent said.
Journalism Department Head Brian Richardson noted the rarity of multiple national award winners in one department in a single year.
“A faculty Fulbright fellow, a student Fulbright fellow and a Watson fellow in the same year may be unique in the history of any university department,” Richardson said. “It shows the strength of our students and their teachers.”
Agnes Flak ’03, a journalism major from Poland, won a Watson Fellowship following her senior year. Professor Emeritus Hampden H. Smith III won Fulbright Fellowships to Russia, Bulgaria and Albania during his more than 30 years on the faculty. Knight Professor in Journalism Ethics Emeritus Louis W. Hodges spent a year in India on a Fulbright Fellowship.
The university’s most recent Rhodes Scholar, Pat Lopes Harris ’91, was a journalism and politics major.
Axt said she hopes to begin assisting at a primary school in Dijon by October, and plans to spend nine months there. While in the classroom she plans to study how the French educational system uses literature to teach students about other cultures.
Axt attended the Normandale French Immersion School from kindergarten through fifth grade in Minnesota. When she was in seventh grade her family traveled to France. She has also traveled in Argentina, Spain and Turkey.
“The most important thing you can have is a culturally well-rounded education,” she said, “and that’s something I’ve been lucky enough to have through my study of languages.”