Ask Matt Parnell if he thought he would be traveling to Egypt as a Fulbright scholar when he was playing baseball at Roanoke Rapids High School, the answer would be a resounding, “No way.”

Now he can look back and say, “The older I get, the more I realize how much I enjoy a challenge.”

His 14-month trip will be a challenge because the University of Arkansas doctoral candidate will be working on a dissertation in a little studied area: The Emergence of Youth Political Activism and Youth Culture in Egypt, 1892-1919.

“I’ve always been interested in the modern world,” Parnell said in a telephone interview Friday. “The world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was in transition. I’ve always enjoyed reading about nationalism, revolutionary movements and colonialism.”

Egypt, during that time, was, “Rapidly becoming a modern nation.”

A novel by an Egyptian writer sparked his interest in the subject and Parnell will be pouring through newspapers, plays, poetry and police records to document his dissertation. “The periodical press was exploding,” he said. “It is in that era when you see music, plays and poetry. You have youth writing plays, theater to get out the message.”

In the first five months of his trip he will refine his Arabic. “I’ve taken many years of Arabic. It’s an incredibly hard language to learn. I’ve studied it for five years and need a little more. The next nine months I will do research.”

Parnell, the son of Richard Parnell and Jeanie Stallings, has always been interested in history. “I’m curious about other people. When I went to college I debated some other fields but it always came back to history courses. That’s what I stuck with.”

He never dreamed, however, he would become interested in the history of the Middle East. It happened when he walked into history class at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington with his hair bleached and the professor, an expert on Middle East history, made a comment. They became close and he took as many classes as he could from her.

“Ever since he was a small child he always was fascinated and had a passion for history,” his father said Friday. “He always followed his dream and had a lot of support from his family.”

The application process was also challenging, Parnell said. “You had to write a ton of essays, there were three or four different screening processes. There was screening on campus and a national screening.”

Now Parnell is waiting for his medical clearance and will leave for Egypt the middle of July. News he earned the Fulbright still amazes him. “I can’t explain the stuff that’s happened to me. It’s all been a labor of love.”