Three Faculty Members Receive Fulbright Grants

Author: Pierce Graham-Jones

In what is believed to be an unprecedented number, three Middlebury College faculty members received prestigious Fulbright Scholar grants this year. With these grants, Assistant Professor of Russian Tatiana Smorodinskaya, Assistant Professor of History Ian Barrow and Professor of Dance Andrea Olsen will be researching and lecturing this year in Russia, India and New Zealand, respectively.
Three Fulbrights is unusually high, for colleges of Middlebury's size. Neither Williams College nor Amherst College had any Fulbright Scholar grants awarded to faculty members this year and Yale University had only two.
The Fulbright Program, of which the Fulbright Scholar Program is a component, "foster[s] relations between academic institutions worldwide," according to Olsen. This, she continued, "supports the interest of international scholarly exchange so vital to the American academic and professional community." The Scholar Program provides grants that allow approximately 800 scholars and professionals to research and lecture in over 140 countries worldwide. Funded by the United States Congress, it is a widely respected and, consequentially, highly competitive scholastic program. The application process involves a detailed proposal, three letters of recommendation and a physical exam. Last year, the U.S. Student Program (a separate component) received a total of 4,501 applications for only 960 grants.
Since Middlebury faculty members may only take leave every six years, they must time their applications so that the potential grant coincides with their leave.
Smorodinskaya will be at the International University in Moscow where she will study the Russian poet Konstantin Sluchevsky, research Russian cartoons, teach a course on the problems of intercultural communications between Russians and Americans and conduct workshops on using technology in the Foreign Language classroom.
She is especially looking forward to refreshing her experience of living and working in Russia. She believes this is vastly importance to her role as a professor of the language and culture of Russia here at Middlebury. Smorodinskaya has been a professor at the College since 1998.
Barrow's project is solely research based: He will be studying the year 1799 in Indian history at the University of Delhi. This year in history was particularly heavy with British influx, and Barrow is interested in studying the resulting social interactions.
In his own words, "How did people interact hospitably and inhospitably?" Barrow has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has been a professor at Middlebury since 1998.
Olsen's project continues her ongoing work examining the question, "Does it change how we dance and what we dance about if we bring our attention to place?" As part of her three year Body and Earth International Performance Project, she will spend four months in New Zealand, "teaching, performing and choreographing with Maori dancers, participating in various workshops and researching the relationship between place and dance throughout New Zealand," she said.
Olsen has been a professor at Middlebury since 1972.