The increasing integration of Europe has posed fascinating, and challenging, problems--for politicians, corporate leaders, economists, and scholars. This is the realm that Pamela Camerra-Rowe had made her intellectual home. A political science professor at Kenyon, Rowe studies the lobbying strategies of European businesses over the past two decades in response to the creation of a single European market and currency. She also explores the impact of European integration and monetary union on political parties.

"I'm interested in the relationship between politics and economics, how the economic actors and events affect the policy-making process," she says. "I want to teach my students not only the analytical concepts necessary to explain political phenomena, but ways of applying those concepts to real-life situations. I use a lot of examples from my own experiences."

Those experiences began with stints in stateside journalism. As a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, Camerra-Rowe covered everything from politics to high-school football games in the small town of Rock Hill, South Carolina. Later, she wrote about education issues at the U.S. Supreme Court for Education Daily and Higher Education Daily. Political science in the wider world beckoned, however, in the form of a fellowship at the Institute for European Politics in Bonn, Germany, where she studied deregulation issues in both Germany and Great Britain. Later, as part of a professional internship, she worked at the German Economics Ministry.

Camerra-Rowe encourages her students to explore similar opportunities and works closely with them on preparing their proposals for postgraduate fellowships. She was thrilled when a former Kenyon student won a highly competitive Robert Bosch Foundation fellowship-the same fellowship that she herself had won.