Three awarded A. Scott Berg '71 English research scholarships

Three students won an English department prize yesterday offering them each a $3,500 stipend for summer research.

The A. Scott Berg '71 Scholarship was awarded to Patrick Cunningham '05, Caroline Murphree '04 and Andrew Romano '04.

Cunningham will research in Rome for an upcoming novel, Romano will explore the mythological construction of Los Angeles and Murphree will study the childhood notebooks of Jane Austen in England.

Berg — whose University studies served as the foundation for his National Book Award-winning "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius" — set up the scholarship in 2001 to help English majors cover the living, travel and research expenses of their studies, either independent or related to University courses. In 1999, Berg won the Pulitzer Prize for his bestselling biography of Charles Lindbergh.

Cunningham said he plans to use the scholarship to extend his summer stay in Rome, the setting for part of his novel "The Relic Thief."

"It a novel about the spiritual decaying of the Catholic Church with the industrial and economic rise and fall of Cleveland, Ohio," Cunningham said. "I want to get to the root of the festering decadence that gave way to people losing their faith."

Cunningham said he hopes two months working at the U.S. embassy to the Vatican and a third month dedicated to writing and researching seminary life in Rome and that city's relics will provide him with background for his novel.

The novel may become Cunningham's creative thesis, and he hopes to publish his work.

Romano will use the grant to trace how Los Angeles has become "a literary idea, an imaginative construction, a landscape of symbols."

Through "voracious" reading, writing, photography and research, Romano said he plans to examine the city's literary, cinematic, musical and architectural construction. The research will kick off his thesis and build on his junior paper.

"I was brought up to believe in Los Angeles as some sort of Promised Land," Romano said. "As an outsider, I believed in everything I had heard about it."

Romano's studies will help deconstruct the myths of the city and understand how artists have turned it into an American symbol.

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Murphree will go to the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford to study Jane Austen.

"I plan to study her role as a transitional writer between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to look at her early writing as a starting point of that transition," Murphree said.

Murphree was introduced to Austen when she was 12.

"I was given 'Pride and Prejudice' as a Christmas present. I read it and hated it," she said.

Years later, she returned to the novel and liked it so much that she constructed an independent tutorial to read Austen with a high school teacher.

Murphree continued her study of Austen at the University and also while studying abroad at Cambridge during her sophomore year.

She said she thinks her greatest challenge will be to "find something new to say" about an author extensively read and criticized, but hopes to explore "the development of Austen's dialogue and its role in the insulation and penetration of private space."

While in England, Murphree also plans to visit Austen's house at Chawton, which has been converted into a museum.