Mohorovich '08 to Pursue Ph.D. in Philosophy as Lilly Graduate Fellow

Matthew S. Mohorovich ’08, from Astoria, Queens, N.Y., has been selected as one of 16 Lilly Graduate Fellows, as announced by the Lilly Fellows Program.

The Lilly Graduate Fellows Program supports, during the course of their graduate education, exceptionally well qualified young men and women who have bachelor degrees from Lilly Fellowship Program Network Schools and who are interested in becoming teacher-scholars at church-related colleges and universities in the United States.

This is the third highly-competitive award Mohorovich, who received a bachelor’s degree in biology and philosophy at Holy Cross, has received in recent years. In 2008, he was awarded a Watson Fellowship for his self-designed research project titled “All that Jazz: Feeling the Beat in the Balkans.”

In 2009, he received a four-year Javits Fellowship, awarded to students of superior academic ability — selected on the basis of demonstrated achievement, financial need, and exceptional promise — to undertake study at the doctoral and master of fine arts level in selected fields of arts, humanities, and social sciences. He received a master’s degree last spring from the New School for Social Research in New York through the fellowship.

This fall, Mohorovich will pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy at Boston College. He will remain a Javits Fellow during most of his time there.

With an interest in political philosophy and political thought, his current research is on the problem of solipsism as laid out in the history of German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling), and how that problem is pivotal to the contemporary philosophical discussion concerning “violence” and “non-violence” as well as to contemporary issues in environmental ethics.

The 16 Fellows were selected by a nine-member selection committee who interviewed 24 finalists (selected from 61 applicants) in April in Indianapolis. Following an inaugural conference, the fellows will embark on a long-distance colloquium, engage in one-on-one mentoring relationships, and participate in three additional conferences. All 16 are pursuing doctoral degrees in the humanities or the arts.

The Lilly Fellows Program recently named Charles Strauss ’02 to a similar program, a Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities and the Arts at Valparaiso University in Indiana.

The Lilly Graduate Fellows Program is funded by a generous grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.