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Eleven University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students and recent graduates have received 2009-2010 Fulbright U.S. Student Program awards to study, teach or conduct research in other countries.

Eleven University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students and recent graduates have received 2009-2010 Fulbright U.S. Student Program awards to study, teach or conduct research in other countries.

Nationwide, more than 1,450 students were chosen for academic or professional achievement and leadership potential.

The Fulbright operates in more than 155 countries. The late Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas established the program in 1946 to build mutual understanding among people of the United States and the rest of the world.

The Fulbright program is sponsored by the U.S. department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. At UNC, it is administered by the Center for Global Initiatives.

“The Fulbright program is one of the largest and most prestigious international exchange programs in the world,” said Tripp Tuttle, program officer and Fulbright program adviser. “It gives our graduating seniors and graduate students nine- to 12-month fully funded international opportunities that will truly change their lives.”

The recipients will pursue their projects abroad during the current, 2009-2010 academic year, Tuttle said. This year’s Fulbright scholars and their projects, listed alphabetically by North Carolina town and by state, are:

North Carolina

Asheville
Andrew Magill, a recent graduate with a degree in cultural studies, will videotape narratives of families in Malawi who are infected and affected by AIDS. He will create a 15-track recording and a documentary. Magill was one of only four Fulbright-mtvU award winners nationally. The program, collaboration between MTV and the Fulbright program, sends students abroad on projects that promote the power of music to foster international understanding. Follow Magill’s project at http://fulbright.mtvu.com/.

Chapel Hill
Allison Rodriguez, a history doctoral candidate in the College of Arts and Sciences, will travel to Poland, where she will study nationalization pressures on the people of the Upper Silesia region during World War I. She will test the assumption that the war was a catalyst for nationalism in Eastern Europe.

William Meyer, an anthropology doctoral candidate in the College of Arts and Sciences, will work in the Burgundy region of France to understand the importance of historic tombs in Western Europe during the Bronze and Iron Ages. He also plans to explore how ancient sites have become involved in landscape practices of the present, how archaeology developed in this part of France and tensions between historic preservation and agricultural pursuits.

Carrboro
Stephen Milder, a history doctoral candidate in the College of Arts and Sciences, will investigate the growth and development of the anti-nuclear movement in West Germany during the 1970s. By focusing first on early anti-reactor protests in the Rhine Valley, he will investigate how the German anti-nuclear movement developed. Milder will seek conclusions about social mobilization and insights into why nuclear power became such a salient political issue in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Charlotte
Jessica Raynor, a recent graduate with a degree in economics, who studied in the College of Arts and Sciences, will study the impact of capital controls that Malaysia imposed during the 1997 economic crisis. She will seek to discover whether they helped the country after the crisis or the country’s welfare was due to other aspects of its economy.

Brett Sturm, a recent graduate with a degree in history, who studied in the College of Arts and Sciences, will travel to Germany to pursue his interests in German history and language while also teaching English as a Second Language. He plans to study topics in German historical preservation.

Greensboro
Susan Burgin, a recent graduate with a degree in environmental sciences and German, will study the exchange of cultural knowledge in Germany while also serving as an English teaching assistant. Burgin will work to improve her German communication ability and seek to learn about the German perspective on the environment.

Raleigh
Jennifer Carpenter, a recent graduate with a degree in journalism and mass communication, who studied in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will travel to Albania. There she will work for four months with MJAFT!, a grassroots organization concerned with youth education. Then she will spend the rest of her time abroad creating a documentary film about the identity of Albanian youth and seeking support for governmental and non-governmental organizations working to civically activate young people.

California
Emily Ravenscroft of San Jose, a communication studies doctoral candidate in the College of Arts and Sciences, will focus on narratives in Ireland: linguistic or material stories community members tell that create a communal identity. She will study whether the stories and performances shift as different social and economic pressures increase or decrease, and how reveal changes in attitudes toward the language, political efficacy and tradition.

New Hampshire
Elizabeth Robinson of Nashua, a classics doctoral candidate in the College of Arts and Sciences, will travel to Italy to study settlement patterns, major monuments and inscriptions in the Laurium region to see how they reflect the adoption or rejection of Roman culture from the fourth to first centuries B.C. Her project will involve viewing artifacts, conducting research in Rome and meeting with scholars who study Laurium.

Texas
Thomas Hylands of Lufkin, a political science master’s degree candidate in the College of Arts and Sciences, will study the impact that different approaches to welfare (social democratic, conservative or liberal) have on obesity rates in the United States and the European Union. He will pursue the project at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands with UNC political science professor Liesbet Hooghe, Ph.D. as part of a transatlantic master’s degree program offered by UNC and a consortium of European universities.

Center for Global Initiatives Web site: http://cgi.unc.edu
Fulbright/mtvU award description: https://us.fulbrightonline.org/overview_typesgrants.html

Center for Global Initiatives contact: Tripp Tuttle, (919) 962-3094, tripp.tuttle@unc.edu
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589

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