Two University of Glasgow scholars have been awarded prestigious scholarships by the Fulbright Commission to study in the United States of America.

And the University is to host three incoming academics from the USA, also under the auspices of the Fulbright Commission.

Professor David Fearn, International Dean for North America, said he was delighted by the awards for both outgoing and incoming Fulbright scholars.

“I am particularly pleased that our relationship with the Fulbright Commission is expanding – there are clearly-recognised reputational benefits from this international engagement.”

The US-UK Fulbright Commission was created by treaty on 22 September 1948. It offers grants at postgraduate and postdoctoral level for study in any discipline and at any accredited institution in the US and UK, as well as a number of special exchanges programmes for shorter projects or for younger scholars.

During the last six decades, approximately 15,000 UK nationals have studied in the US and 12,000 US nationals in the UK as part of the Fulbright Programme. Prominent alumni of the Fulbright programme include poet Sylvia Plath; Charles Kennedy MP, former rector and an alumnus of the University of Glasgow; journalist, author and Fulbright Commissioner Toby Young; and the economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman.

This year’s outgoing participants will be:

• Dr Arun Sood, a recent PhD graduate who has received a Scottish Studies Fulbright Award to research and write a book on the reception and cultural influence of Robert Burns in the USA during the 19th century; he will be studying at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. After completing a Masters in American Literature at the University of Amsterdam in 2009, he took a break from scholarly research and worked as a travel journalist for several publications including The Guardian, Time Out and Lonely Planet. Having written in and about several countries, Arun returned to his homeland of Scotland in 2012 after being awarded an AHRC-grant to undertake a PhD in Scottish Literature at The University of Glasgow, completed in 2015.‌
• Dr Karen Renaud, a Senior Lecturer in Computing Science, who has worked in industry and in academia and has a strong technical background. Her research interests have now moved towards the human aspects of cyber security. Her main aim is to make it easier for people to behave securely, by designing secure systems with human strengths and preferences in mind. She has won the Fulbright Cyber Award and will be hosted by Mississippi State University. She was educated at the Universities of Pretoria, South Africa, and Glasgow. Her PhD was funded by an Association of Commonwealth Universities Scholarship.‌

Incoming scholars will be:

• Professor Colin Parrish, the John M. Olin Professor of Virology in the Baker Institute for Animal Health at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University in New York, who will use the 6-month visiting professorship to collaborate with four different groups in Glasgow and the Centre for Virus Research on viruses that infect animals and humans.
• Victoria Chatfield, from Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, New York, who has won a Distinguished Award in Teaching. She will spend six months at Glasgow and studying multi-cultural learning communities in the UK’s national youth theatres. She has taught reading and drama for the past eight years and received the Voya Unsung Heroes Award, given in the US for innovation in curriculum planning. In 2012 she founded the National Theatre for Student Artists, an organisation that brings together students from across the US to create new theatrical works off-Broadway.
• (James) Riley Cruttenden, from The Ohio State University, to pursue a full-time, one-year MLitt in Technical Art History (TAH) at the University of Glasgow - the only school in the world to offer this degree. He sees TAH as a burgeoning field that combines scientific analysis and art history to produce new knowledge about cultural heritage objects and hopes the programme will support his future work in art conservation.

 

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First published: 30 June 2016