Senior Genevieve (Gennie) Gebhart has been named a 2013 Luce Scholar and will spend the 2013-14 academic year in a professional internship in an Asian country (yet to be determined), supported by opportunities for language study and a generous stipend. Gebhart is majoring in international studies and economics.
The Luce Scholars Program is a major national scholarship for which applicants must be nominated by their university. Gebhart was nominated by the University of Washington from a pool of campus applicants that included graduating seniors, graduate students and alumni. The foundation selects 15-18 scholars each year.
Gebhart would like to work in information justice and international library development. “We’re talking anything from mobile floating libraries in Thailand to narrative documentary projects in rural China to the National Digital Library in South Korea,” she wrote in an email. The Asia Foundation, which administers the program, will work with Gebhart and other scholarship recipients to place them in internships that match their interests.
Hands-on experience attracted Gebhart’s interest to libraries. She has worked at the UW’s Odegaard Undergraduate Library, the Northwest branch of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, and the UW Media Center.
This quarter, Gebhart is in Rome working on her honors thesis for the UW Jackson School of International Studies. She is studying eating disorders and family dynamics in Southern Italian film.
About the scholarship, she wrote, “It still feels like I could wake up from this dream any minute, but it’s sinking in more and more every day!”
The Luce Scholars Program represents a major effort by the Henry Luce Foundation to provide an awareness of Asia among potential leaders in American society. Launched in 1974, the Luce Scholars Program is aimed at a group of highly qualified young Americans in a variety of professional fields. It is unique among American-Asian exchanges in that it is intended for young leaders who have had limited experience of Asia and who might not otherwise have an opportunity in the normal course of their careers to come to know Asia.