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Tedd Wimperis, BC Class of 2011, and Robert Kubala, BC Class of 2009, have been selected as two of the 16 new Lilly Graduate Fellows, the Lilly Fellows Program has announced.
Kubala earned a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy summa cum laude from Boston College. He was a member of BC's Presidential Scholars Program and College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program. He received the University's Peter Gray Award for creative achievement in psychology in 2007, and was a two-time winner of advanced study grants from BC, one to support advanced language work in Germany and the other to support intensive language, linguistics and cultural study at the Nordal Institute in Reykjavik, Iceland. In his senior year, he was awarded a prestigious George Marshall Scholarship in support of graduate-level study in the United Kingdom.
He went on to earn his MLitt from the St. Andrews and Stirling Graduate Programme in philosophy and his MPhil in history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. He will pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University. His main interests are in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology, but he has also written and delivered papers on Heidegger, American pragmatism, aesthetics, the history of the neurosciences, and the relationship between philosophy and literature.
Wimperis was awarded a bachelor of arts degree in Classics magna cum laude from Boston College in May. He also was a two-time winner of BC advanced study grants, which supported his research on medieval manuscripts and medieval textual criticism and analysis and translation of a poetic narrative in Latin of the Third Crusade. He will attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this fall to pursue a Ph.D. in Classics. His primary interest is in Latin literature, particularly epic poetry from the First Century B.C. through the Flavian Period. He also is interested in comparative study of classical Roman poetry with the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. His research focuses on the intersection of history with poetic imagination, and how civilizations expressed their social and cultural identity through narrative poetry.
The Lilly Graduate Fellows Program is an initiative of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts that supports outstanding students who want to explore the connections among Christianity, higher education, and the vocation of the teacher-scholar. All 16 Fellows are pursuing doctoral studies in humanities or the arts.
The Fellows were selected by a nine-member committee that interviewed 24 finalists chosen from 61 applicants in April, 2011. The Fellows will meet together for three days at an inaugural conference on August 1-4 in Indianapolis with their mentors, Caroline Simon of Hope College and Thomas S. Hibbs of Baylor University.
Following the conference, the Fellows will embark on a three-year program in which they participate in a long-distance colloquium, engage in one-on-one mentoring relationships, attend three additional conferences, and receive three annual stipends of $3000 to use at their discretion.
Since its founding in 1991, the Valparaiso University-based Lilly Fellows Program has provided postdoctoral fellowships for teacher-scholars who seek to enrich their intellectual and spiritual lives while preparing for leadership roles in church-related higher education. The Lilly Graduate Fellows Program is funded by a generous grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
For more information, visit www.lillyfellows.org.