UA STUDENT NAMED FIRST DIANE D. BLAIR FELLOW

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - UA student Susan Dollar was selected as the first University of Arkansas Diane D. Blair Graduate Fellow for her outstanding performance in the classroom and written work.

The fellowship will support Dollar's graduate program, including the researching and writing of her dissertation.

The Diane D. Blair Center for the Study of Southern Politics and Society was founded last year, and the graduate fellowship program was introduced for the first time by the history and English departments.

The Blair fellowship is a three-year scholarship that will add $6,000 to the candidate's existing graduate fellowship. The faculty makes the nominations and the Departmental Awards Committee examines the candidate's file and votes on to whom to give the fellowship. The dean's approval then makes the selection official.

Jeannie M. Whayne, department of history chairperson, said one letter written in Dollar's behalf referred to her as "not only one of the very best doctoral candidates currently in our program but one of the finest we have ever had."

"We are particularly pleased that she was selected as the first Diane D. Blair fellow," Whayne said. "She has been a graduate student in our program for a couple of years. The fellowship should allow her to complete her course work (which is almost done anyway), take her qualifying exams and then write her dissertation."

Dollar is planning to write the dissertation on Creoles in the Catholic Church in Louisiana in the antebellum period.

"I plan to research the Catholic Church and its role in the lives of Creoles of color in Louisiana," Dollar said. "A main Creole community that I plan to study is Isle Brevelle, on the Cane River in north Louisiana."

Dollar said the community is largely composed of descendents of a slave woman named Marie Therese Coin-Coin and a French soldier, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer. Metoyer freed Marie Therese and their children from slavery. The descendents were free people of color who owned slaves and plantations along the Cane River, dating back to the eighteenth century.

St. Augustine Catholic Church is at the heart of this community and has been since it was founded in 1803. It is the first Catholic Church established in the United States by people of color for people of color.

"I plan to research its work in Isle Brevelle as it provided schools and organizations that helped define the community and its people," Dollar said.

Dollar is the assistant director of the Arkansas Center for Oral and Visual History in Fayetteville and a native of Natchitoches, La. She received her master's degree in English at Texas A & M and received a master's degree in history at Northwestern State University of Louisiana.

She published the book The Freedmen's Bureau Schools of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, 1865-1868 with the NSU Press in 1998, and she published an article in the Ozark Historical Review in Spring 2000 entitled "Viney Grove Methodist Church: A View into the Frontier Ministry of Western Washington County, Arkansas."

She received the Gordon McNeil Graduate Award for Outstanding Graduate Research Paper from the department of history in Spring 2000.

The Diane D. Blair Fellowship was established in remembrance of Diane Divers Blair who died June 26, 2000 after a courageous battle with lung cancer.

During her 30 years as a professor of political science at the U of A, she authored 14 chapters in books and published over 90 articles, primarily on Arkansas, state and local government, as well as women in politics. Her book on politics, Arkansas Politics and Government: Do the People Rule, set the standard for such works.

She served two terms as chair of the board of the U.S. Corporation for Public Broadcasting and earned the distinction of Outstanding Faculty Member three times. She was the first UA faculty member to receive the Fulbright College Master Teacher Award.

She is listed in American Who’s Who in Government and Politics and in World Who’s Who of Women.