UO senior earns top scholarship.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

A University of Oregon senior who plans to study international politics and African studies has become the school's first-ever recipient of the prestigious Marshall Scholarship.

Alletta Brenner will pursue master's degrees in both subjects during a two-year stay at the University of Edinburgh beginning this fall. She will graduate from the UO this spring with a double major in history and women's and gender studies with a minor in political science.

Brenner, a Presidential Scholar at the UO, also was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship. The Marshall and Rhodes scholarships are considered the most distinguished honors for post-baccalaureate study.

Brenner said she hadn't intended to apply for the scholarship but pursued it after Marilyn Linton, the UO associate vice provost for undergraduate studies, urged her to try for it. That was after Linton heard Brenner present a paper that earned her the university's Undergraduate Library Research Award.

"This sort of wasn't in my plan," Brenner said Wednesday. "The whole thing was sort of serendipitous, but it's turned out well."

The Marshall Scholarship provides full tuition and living expenses as well as textbook, research and daily travel costs. The program was established in 1953 as a gesture of thanks from the British government for American assistance in rebuilding Europe after World War II and is named after Gen. George Marshall, author of the Marshall Plan.

Brenner was among more than 400 students who applied for the scholarship. She flew to San Francisco for an interview at the British Consulate on Nov. 19 and is one of 43 chosen for the 2006 award.

She was born and raised in Forest Grove and gained an interest in social justice issues while helping her parents bring food and clothing to migrant farm workers. In Scotland, her studies will focus on the role nongovernmental organizations play in international affairs, particularly in developing nations.

"The number of NGOs has proliferated a lot in the last two decades, and these organizations are becoming more and more involved with government decision-making and with intergovernmental institutions like the United Nations and the European Union," Brenner said. "And there's still a lot of questions about how these organizations should fit into the global political sphere and what kind of influence they have and about the ethical things involved when you have organizations trying to go to different places in the world and make changes there."

Brenner's research will focus on the efforts of NGOs to end slavery in the African nation of Niger.

When she completes those studies, she plans to spend two years in the Teach for America program and later hopes to go to law school and focus on international law.

She hopes eventually to help establish international labor standards, particularly for countries that join cross-border trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Act.