UC Fulbright Wins Mean Prestigious Research and Teaching Opportunities for Faculty and Students

Three University of Cincinnati students have received Fulbright U.S. Student Program Scholarship awards for the 2011-12 academic year. This year’s student winners will have the opportunity to travel to Bulgaria, Poland and South Korea in order to teach, work and conduct research.

In addition, at least seven UC faculty members have received Fulbright awards for the coming school year, to conduct research and/or teach in Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Palestine and South Africa.

The following UC students have been awarded Fulbright grants for the 2011-2012 academic year:

• Caitlin Kane of Wyoming, Ohio, just completed her UC master’s of education in curriculum and instruction, with an emphasis on secondary education and English language arts, in June 2011. From August 2011 to June 2012, she will fulfill an English Teaching Assistantship, teaching English at a foreign language school in Haskovo, Bulgaria. In addition to her teaching responsibilities , Kane will work with 12th-grade students to help them prepare applications for U.S. universities and will conduct a research project on the interaction of art and education in Bulgaria.

• Douglas Pew of Erlanger, Ky., is pursuing a doctoral degree in composition and conducting. From mid-September 2011 through May 2012, he will be learning from and working with well-known choral composer Pawel Lukaszewski in Warsaw, Poland. Pew will take courses from Lukaszewski at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, gain experience in composing and conducting for small projects, plan a recital of his own previous compositions,  and work on his doctoral dissertation, a choral composition with a soprano soloist and string accompaniment titled “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.”

• Ruth Williams of Lincoln, Neb., a doctoral student in English literature/creative writing, will complete a poetry manuscript that explores U.S.-Korea relations, while living and working in  Seoul, South Korea, from August 2011 to June 2012. Before coming to UC, Williams taught English in South Korea and has since written poems on that experience. In returning to that country, she is interested in placing her personal experience within the larger historical and cultural context in terms of national roles on a global stage. She will also work with faculty at Sogang University in Seoul to explore how her work might serve as a conversation with Korean poets past and present.

In addition, the Fulbright program has provided support to at least four UC faculty members who will conduct research and teach abroad during the coming academic year. These include

• Chia-Chi Ho, UC associate professor of chemical engineering, will conduct research on nanotechnology in Canada during the spring and summer of 2012. She will work at University of British Columbia.

• Architectural historian Nnamdi Elleh of Price Hill, associate professor in UC’s School of Architecture and Interior Design, researches how countries commemorate revolutions via architecture – whether that be a study of Washington, D.C., as a product of the American Revolution, Russian architecture in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution or current construction in South African in the wake of the protests that ended apartheid in 1994. In fact, Elleh has won a Fulbright to both teach and study on post-revolution architecture in South Africa from January to September 2012. And following that trip, he figures his future research locales will be in North Africa to study how current uprising there play out by means of the region’s architecture.

• Human and women’s rights researcher Jan Marie Fritz of Amberley, a UC professor of planning and a senior research fellow with the Centre for Sociological Research at the University of Johannesburg, will spend this fall at the Institute for Human Rights in Copenhagen, Denmark, thanks to the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Human Rights and International Studies that she received. There, she will conduct research related to processes and progress on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, passed unanimously in the year 2000 and calling for improvement in the status of women around the globe by means of an end to violence (rape and killing) specifically targeting women and girls as a tactic and weapon within armed conflicts; integration and involvement of women in peace building and conflict mediation and resolution as a means to end and in the aftermath of violent or armed conflict; and facilitation of the equal and full participation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions.

• Christopher Gauker, UC professor of philosophy, will spend five months in Vienna, Austria, as the Fulbright-University of Vienna Visiting Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences beginning in February 2012. At the University of Vienna, he will teach a course on the relation between thought and language and another on the nature of perception. He will work with Professor Martin Kusch on a project titled “A Third Conception of the Normativity of Meaning,” which addresses a contemporary debate concerning the nature of linguistic meaning. His fourth book, “Words and Images: An Essay on the Origin of Ideas,” was released in July by Oxford University Press.

• Julianne Lynch, adjunct instructor in the English & Communications Department of UC Blue Ash College, will serve as a Fulbright lecturer in Germany.

• Jim Ridolfo, of Lexington, Ky., UC assistant professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature, is the recipient of a 2011-12 Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Fulbright. One of only two faculty in the nation to receive this award for next year, Ridolfo will spend seven months in the West Bank and Israel on his project, “Letting Go of the Text: Changing Samaritan Attitudes Toward the Circulation of their Pentateuch.” The Samaritans, a 720-member religious community split between the Palestinian West Bank and Holon, Israel, have a similar Torah to that of Jewish people but with a number of key theological differences. In the past four years, elders in their community have expressed the need to digitize their sacred texts. Said Ridolfo, “As I was working on building a digital archive tailored to their specific cultural needs, I started to realize through my conversations with Samaritan elders that something significant was happening. The Samaritans once limited the distribution of their holy texts to the point where 17th-century European scholars resorted to trickery to steal their texts; however, today many Samaritans support the digitization and public distribution of their texts. I plan to investigate this shift in greater detail.”

• Willard Sunderland, department head and associate professor in the Department of History, will spend seven months in East Asia as a Fulbright Scholar Senior Research Fellow for his new book project, “Continental Encounters: Eurasian Empires in the Cosmopolitan Age.” Though his research specialty is Russian history, he has spent recent years studying Chinese and is interested in comparative projects, including comparative history involving the Russian and Chinese empires during the 18th century. He will spend six months in Beijing, China, and one month in Taipei, Taiwan.