UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 2, Page 2                                
September 10, 1992                                             
Famous American poets interest graduate fellow                 
                                                               
     When Delaware graduate student Christine Modey took a poetry    
writing course as an undergraduate at Hope College in Holland, Mich.,
it changed the course of her academic life.                          
     Studying chemistry, she completed all the courses for her major,
graduating magna cum laude, but discovered her true love was writing 
and literature. "I was absolutely hooked and decided to minor in     
writing," she recalls.                                               
     In addition to writing poetry for her course, Modey took on other        
writing tasks-writing some articles for the local paper, essays for  
campus publications, working in the college's public relations office
and even writing the college's annual report.                        
     A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she also received numerous awards as
an undergraduate, including prizes for the best essay on literature, 
for creativity in the arts, for the outstanding paper at the student 
arts and humanities colloquia and others.                            
     Married to Barry Fuller, a medical student at Thomas Jefferson     
Medical College and also an alumnus of Hope College, Modey said the  
University of Delaware was an excellent choice for her, both for its 
location and from the support she has received from the English      
department. She was a teaching assistant her first year, and the     
following year was a research assistant to Hershel Parker, H. F. Brown        
Professor of English, who is her adviser. Thanks to her fellowship,  
she can devote herself full time to her studies.                     
     Planning to complete her course requirements this year, Modey has        
not finalized her dissertation subject but plans to do research on the        
major American poets, such as Walt Whitman, and those who are less   
studied today, such as John Greenleaf Whittier. She is interested in 
what critics of the period wrote about these poets, what criteria they        
used in evaluating poetry and how 19th-century newspapers and        
magazines shaped American literary tastes.                           
                                        -Sue Swyers Moncure    
                                                                     
     Articles on the research and study of the 1992-93 competitive   
scholarship fellows will be featured in UpDate periodically during the        
next year.