Emory Students Selected for Fullbrights

A record number of students recieved Fulbright Scholarships for the 2011-2012 year.

Twenty-eight undergraduate students applied for the prestigious grant, and 12 were selected as finalists. This year, roughly 9,400 students nationwide applied for 1,600 available grants.

The Fulbright program was established by congress in 1946 and is the largest federally funded international exchange teaching program. Grants include teaching a research abroad, travel expenses, health insurance and a monthly stipend.

Here's a look at the Emory undergraduate and graduate students selected, courtesy of Emory University:

• Taylor Brooks, political science and anthropology. Brooks will head to Vietnam, where he previously studied abroad and did research. He will serve as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA).
• Allison Cohen, Asian studies and linguistics. Cohen received a research grant for study in China to examine successive Chinese translations of an ancient Sanskrit Buddhist text, looking particularly at how the concept of emptiness was translated into Chinese, which had no characters that express the concept.
• John Gibson, history and French. Gibson will conduct archival research in Switzerland in both Neuchatel and Bern, examining the diplomatic role of Switzerland during the French Revolution. He conducted previous research in these archives as a student, sponsored by grants from Emory.
• Kevin Hatcher, French and linguistics. Hatcher received an ETA to work in Morocco. He also will conduct informal research on code-switching in Morocco’s dual languages (French and Arabic). Following high school graduation and before enrolling at Emory, Hatcher spent one year in Detroit as an AmeriCorps volunteer and one year in Paris, taking coursework and serving as an ETA.
• Karina Legradi, international studies and Chinese. Legradi received an ETA to work in Taiwan. During a study abroad semester in China, she taught English as a volunteer and also served as a mentor to children at the same orphanage where she had volunteered during a high school course of study in China.
• An Nguyen, environmental studies and chemistry. Nguyen received a research grant to study mosquito populations and ecology in Vietnam to determine where they are most numerous and in what environment they most flourish. She has conducted similar research with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nguyen is a native of Vietnam and immigrated to the United States as a child.
• Shreyas Sreenath, economics. Sreenath received a research grant for Bangladesh to study the significance of women’s ownership of cows, particularly the effects on nutrition for women and children. He has worked on similar projects in Kenya and Uganda.  
• Jacqueline Troutman, political science and German Studies. Troutman received an ETA to work in Germany. She is fluent in both French and German and previously studied abroad in France and Austria. At Emory, she was a supplemental instructor in Germany.
• Glen Goodman, Ph.D. student in history. Goodman will head to Brazil where he plans to research the case of Germans and their descendants in 20th-century Brazil to learn more how hyphenated ethnic identities are (re)created over time in shifting national and regional contexts.
• Lena Suk, Ph.D. student in history. Suk will do research in Brazil on the evolution of women’s status in the country, specifically using movie theaters as a lens to study women's presence in public leisure culture during a time of intense modernization and urbanization in São Paulo, Brazil, from 1920-1960. Her sources will include films, periodicals, intellectual production, literature, government propaganda and oral history.
• Catherine Prueitt, Ph.D. student in religion. Prueitt will do research in India to study the sources of conflict between two major branches of Buddhism and Hinduism, specifically Yogacara Buddhism and Kashmiri Shaivism, with leading scholars of both traditions.
• Eric Harshfield, master’s of public health. Harshfield will work in South Africa on a project to empower community members to improve their health and well-being in the Limpopo Province. The project will use participatory tools to help the community improve access to water and sanitation facilities and increase knowledge of safe hygiene.
• Matthew Lynch, Ph.D. student in religion. Lynch will do research in Germany to analyze the role of early Jewish (i.e., Persian Era) religious institutions in the diffusion and spread of monotheism, and seek to explain why Israelite monotheism endured while several monotheistic movements that appeared in the ancient world did not.