FARMINGTON – A 2007 magna cum laude graduate of the University of Maine at Farmington Jenna Morency of Brunswick, has been awarded a Fulbright grant.

The grant will allow her to conduct research at Australia’s University of Tasmania and the Archives Office of Tasmania from February to November 2008, she said Tuesday from her home in Orono, where she is a graduate student at the University of Maine working on her master’s in history.

Morency plans to research the plight of U.S. citizens imprisoned by British forces at a Tasmanian penal colony in 1839 for participating in the Canadian Rebellion.

While doing research for a paper, as an undergraduate at UMF, Morency came across memoirs from the prisoners and found them interesting, she said.

After learning of her grant two weeks ago, Morency said she’s still excited. While her plans following her graduate degree are uncertain, she has found “Everything I’ve done with history I’ve loved,” she said.

Morency was encouraged, she said, to apply for the Fulbright grant by her mentor at UMF, associate history Professor Ken Orosz, himself a Fulbright honoree.

“Jenna is among the top students to come through the history program at UMF. Being awarded a Fulbright is a testament to her academic abilities and shows the real value of undergraduate research,” he said.

For the university, Orosz said, the Fulright honor enriches campus life as the students return and share their experiences.

UMF English Professor Eric Brown was also awarded a $50,000 Fulbright grant in June to teach American literature at the University of Bergen in Norway for a year.