Three UT students have received Fulbright Student Program grants to further their studies abroad.
This year’s Fulbright student scholars are:
- Jeremy Pearson, a doctoral candidate in history, who will be studying in Israel;
- Josh Sander, a doctoral candidate in history who will be studying in Germany;
- Kaitlyn Stiles, a doctoral candidate in anthropology, who will be studying in Greece.
In addition, Chris Ludtka, a graduating senior in chemical engineering, has been named a Fulbright alternate. He has since received the Whitaker Scholarship, which funds international study for emerging leaders in biomedical engineering or bioengineering. He will be going to Germany.
The largest US exchange program, Fulbright scholarships provide opportunities for recent graduates, graduate students, and professionals to travel abroad for research, graduate studies, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching. The program is named for Senator J. William Fulbright, who was interested in the “promotion of international good will through the exchange of students in the fields of education, culture, and science.”
Pearson will be based at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He will be studying Latin, Arabic, and Syriac manuscripts at archives in Jerusalem. The working title of his project is “William of Tripoli and his Eastern Context: Reconsidering Muslim-Jewish-Christian Relations in the Crusader States.”
Sander will be doing research at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Freiburg. He’ll also be working at the German Federal Archives in Berlin, conducting research for his dissertation looking at Nazi attempts to recreate Dutch identity through education and propaganda while incorporating the Netherlands into the larger “Greater Germanic Reich.” He is currently the Norman Raab Foundation Visiting Fellow at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He also has received funding from the Center for Jewish History, the Holocaust Education Foundation, the German Historical Institute, and the American Association for Netherlandic Studies.
Stiles is studying biological anthropology and Mediterranean archaeology. In addition to the Fulbright, which will fund her research in Greece, Stiles has received an AIA’s Harriet and Leon Pomerance Fellowship to fund a subsequent year of dissertation research in Greece. Her research incorporates skeletal and material cultural analyses with social theory in the study of the Mycenaean chamber tomb cemetery at Golemi Agios Georgios in East Lokris, in central Greece. She will be exploring the extent to which presumed aspects of Mycenaean elite culture—high status, wealth, and prowess in war—also characterized the population in this outlying area.
UT undergraduate students, graduate students, and alumni interested in applying for the 2015–16 Fulbright US Student Program should visit the Office of National Scholarships and Fellowships website and contact ONSF Director Nichole Fazio-Veigel at nfaziove@utk.edu to discuss the campus application process and deadline schedule.
—
CONTACT:
Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)