Professors receive Fulbrights

Three IU professors have been awarded Fulbright grants to lecture abroad.\nProfessor of education Charles Allen Swanson Bankart was awarded a grant to go to Korea, business administration professor Robert Klemkosky will go to Croatia and linguistics professor Steven Franks will travel to Italy.\nFranks said he is excited about his trip.\n"Venice is one of the best places in the world for me to pursue my academic interests," Franks said. "It offers a vibrant community of active, engaged linguists who are interested in applying the same universalist perspective as I hold to complex comparative issues."\nUnfortunately, Klemkosky said he declined his grant because he will retire next August to create a new business graduate program at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea.\nThe Fulbright is a program promoting international educational exchange that was instituted shortly after the end of World War II.\nJ. William Fulbright, the Arkansas senator behind the grant, viewed it as a way of promoting "mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of the world," according to the Council for International Exchange of Scholars Web site, www.cies.org.\nFranks, whose official title will be Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Venice, said he hopes to live up to this original mandate as he prepares to teach his class, "Slavic Syntax From a Universal Grammar Perspective."\n"The course addresses Slavic language problems of broader theoretical concern," he explained. "Concomitantly, I will conduct my own research into issues stemming from the course material, exploring aspects of case-feature mechanics and the more general question of how optimality might regulate the interface between different modules of grammar."\nThe University of Venice is one of the leading research centers in the world in the area of theoretical syntax, and also has one of the longest standing Fulbright programs.\nFranks said he has chosen to work with Slavic syntax because of the insight it gives into linguistic variation.\n"The comparison of closely-related languages has come to play a key role in recent linguistic research," Franks explained. "In trying to flesh out and delimit the ways in which grammars may vary, it is vital to compare similar phenomena within a closely-knit group of languages. In broad terms, I seek in my comparative work to extend current generative models of variation in core grammatical systems to accommodate the rich range of diversity found among the Slavic languages."\nTo further prepare for his three-month stay in Italy, which is set to begin in mid-March, Franks said he has delved even further into the field of linguistics by sitting in on a few Italian classes. \n"I've never been to Venice, but I've heard it's a beautiful place," he said. "People who have been there tell me it is the most beautiful city in the world."\nBankart could not be reached for comment.\n-- Contact staff writer Chris Freiberg at wfreiber@indiana.edu.