Centre College's Kaitlyn Lee awarded Fulbright Fellowship

Related Media

Kaitlyn Lee of Owensboro

DANVILLE, KY (06/06/2013)(readMedia)-- Kaitlyn Lee of Owensboro, a May graduate of Centre College, was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship. She will spend the next year in Bulgaria in the port city of Vivin, on the Danube across from Romania, where she will teach English in a high school and study Bulgarian.

For the side project Fulbright requires of language assistants, she plans to take her students "hiking while talking about nature and recycling," she says, a tribute to the popular Art of Walking class taught at Centre by Stodghill Professor of French and German Ken Keffer.

But it's really all about learning Bulgarian for Lee. She loves languages-their differences, their similarities, their evolution, everything. Even before she turned in her Fulbright application, she had begun to study the Bulgarian alphabet.

"I want to learn as much of the language as I can and as much about Slavic language," she says.

A classical studies major, Lee started Latin in high school and picked up French at Centre, heading for a semester in Strasbourg after only a year of French. She has also studied American Sign Language.

When Centre added a linguistics minor, in the spring of 2012, she leapt right into it.

"Proto-Indo-European language is the language that all European languages come from," she explains. "It's really old and really cool. We have no evidence of it, but we've reconstructed it by looking at Sanskrit and Latin and German and Slavic languages and working backwards. One of my goals for this Fulbright is to get the experience with Slavic languages so that I can better work with Indo-European and proto-Indo-European languages."

She recently completed a John C. Young honors thesis on Kentucky dialects, contrasting the "Northern" dialect of Evansville, Ind., with the "Southern" dialect just across the Ohio River in Owensboro.

"I applied for a Fulbright because it will completely change my life," she says. "I'm super excited, and I'm also super scared. But I'll work through it while I'm there. Through Centre I've learned that there are a lot of things that are going to put me outside of my comfort zone, but those are the things that are worth doing, because that's how you're going to grow and change."

After her Fulbright year, she will continue to study linguistics at the University of Kentucky. 

She is the daughter of Denny and Joetta Lee of Owensboro and is a graduate of Daviess County High School.

Centre College, founded in 1819, is a nationally ranked liberal arts college in Danville, Ky. Centre hosted its second Vice Presidential Debate on 10.11.12, and remains the smallest college in the smallest town ever to host a general election debate.