March 31, 2003

Scholars Day To Honor Outstanding Students
By Sherry Fisher

Catherine Allgor, author of Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government, will be the keynote speaker at the 10th annual Scholars Day program on Tuesday, April 1.

The event, which honors the University's top students and outstanding faculty, begins at 4 p.m. in the Jorgensen Auditorium and is open to all members of the University community. A reception will take place at 3 p.m.

Allgor, an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, is interested in issues involving politics, women and gender. She is a 2002-2003 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she is working on a political biography of former First Lady Dolley Payne Todd Madison.

After a career in theater, Allgor attended Mount Holyoke College as a Frances Perkins scholar. She received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1998, where she won the Yale Teaching Award. Her dissertation on women and politics in early Washington garnered prizes for the best dissertation in American history at Yale and for the best dissertation in U.S. women's history in the nation.

Her book, Parlor Politics, won the prize for the best first book by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

The Scholars Day event recognizes Babbidge Scholars - undergraduates who earned a 4.0 grade point average during the spring 2002 and fall 2002 semesters; New England Scholars - who earned a 3.5 grade point average during the spring 2002 and fall 2002 semesters; and University Scholars, talented and highly motivated undergraduates selected by the University to pursue accelerated and nontraditional programs of study. The 2002-2003 University's Teaching Fellow will also be honored.

"Each year on Scholars Day we recognize the highest levels of academic excellence among undergraduates within the UConn community," says Lynne Goodstein, associate vice provost and director of honors programs. "The Honors Program and the Chancellor's Office are proud to celebrate the academic achievement, talent, and high standards of this select group of undergraduate students."