Six IUB faculty members receive Fulbright grant

The 2011-12 academic year Fulbright award recipients represent three of IU’s campuses — Bloomington, Indianapolis and Fort Wayne — and many departments and schools throughout the University, including the Kelley School of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences on the Bloomington campus.

The Fulbright Program, an educational exchange program, is sponsored by the U.S. government with the goal to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”

Recipients, after receiving the grant, go abroad to further study, research or teach a topic of interest.

This year, IU faculty will travel across the globe to locations such as Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Japan, Russia, Sweden and Turkey.

In the previous academic year, eight IU faculty and professional staff members received a Fulbright grant. The 2010-11 recipients represented four IU campuses — Bloomington, Indianapolis, Southeast and South Bend — and travelled to locations such as the Caribbean, Eastern and Western Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia.

“The continued success of our faculty who are selected as Fulbright scholars underscores IU’s engagement efforts worldwide,” David Zaret, IU vice president for international affairs, said in a press release. “We are proud of our scholars, who will represent the university worldwide while adding to the depth of their knowledge for the betterment of our students in Indiana.”

The core Fulbright Scholar Program sends about 800 U.S. faculty and professionals each year to more than 100 countries to lecture, teach and conduct research, according to its website.

This year’s IU Bloomington recipients include experts in finance, folklore and ethnomusicology, political science and religious studies.
 
WHO  Regina Smyth
Associate professor of political science and a faculty member in the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis
WHERE  Moscow, Russia
Smyth will continue her research about Russian elections and regime development through observation of the 2011-12 parliamentary and presidential election cycles.

WHO  William Bianco
Professor of political science
WHERE  Russia
Bianco will research and compare NASA and the Russian space program.

WHO  Michael Dylan Foster
Assistant professor of folklore
WHERE  Japan
Foster will conduct research for an upcoming book, “Visiting Strangers: Gods, Ethnographers, and Tourists in Japan.”

WHO  Lynn Hooker
Assistant professor of Central Eurasian studies and an adjunct professor of folklore and musicology
WHERE  Hungary
Hooker will conduct oral history interviews and other forms of research to discover the role of Romani musicians in Hungarian society with a focus on the socialist period.

WHO  Stephen Selka
Assistant professor in the departments of religious studies and American studies
WHERE  Brazil
Selka will spend the spring studying Afro-Brazilian religious practices.

WHO  Richard Shockley
CenterPoint Energy Faculty Fellow and an associate professor of finance
WHERE  Istanbul, Turkey
Shockley plans to study Islamic financing arrangements and their effects on the banking system

­— Matthew Glowicki