Chubb '06 wins 27k to explore 'Old West'
Mimi Chubb '06 has been enamored with the aura of the Old West ever since she discovered traces of it influencing daily life in the unlikeliest of places: suburban Orange County, Calif.As an 11-year-old moving from New Jersey to the vastly different west coast, Chubb brought her love of riding horses with her and not only discovered, but embraced, the "old-time Western veneer hidden away" within the cookie-cutter suburban nature of her new town, she said.When she arrived at the University, Chubb combined her passion for the Western way of life and her innate talent for vivid literary description in a way that impressed her English and creative writing professors and has led to her selection as this year's recipient of the University's Martin Dale Fellowship.As a Dale fellow, Chubb will receive $27,500 to pursue a yearlong project "researching and writing an interlocking collection of essays centered around the idea of imagining the American West ... explor[ing] the ways that constructions of a mythic or an 'authentic' West form certain people's identities and dictate their obsessions," as she described in her proposal."It's such a cool opportunity that Princeton has, devoting a year to do whatever you want," Chubb said.