Reedies Flourish With Fulbrights
Bumper crop of Reed grads win Fulbright fellowships.
For the third time in Reed’s history, six grads have been selected for Fulbright scholarships and will travel to countries including Russia, Morocco, and Latvia.
The largest exchange program in the country, the offers research, study, and teaching opportunities in more than 140 countries to recent graduates and graduate students. Every year the program awards approximately 8,000 grants, with roughly 1,900 of those going to U.S. students.
As a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant, Dylan Holmes ’17 will be a teaching assistant at a Moroccan university. He is also looking forward to volunteering at Moroccan film and visual arts cultural heritage organizations.
Brandon Marrow ’18, also the recipient of an English Teaching Assistantship, will be at the Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University in Novosibirsk, Russia. “In addition to teaching English,” he said, “I will provide various lessons on American culture to Russian and international students who will go on to teach English themselves.” Brandon said that he couldn’t have applied and lasted the eight-month wait without the help of Michelle Johnson of the and fellow alum Erin McConnell ’16.
Timmy Straw ’18 received a Fullbright Research Award along with the Critical Language Enhancement Award, given to Fulbright recipients to facilitate a greater depth of language learning in their host countries. Based in Moscow, Timmy will be researching the the role of poetry in contemporary Moscow—in particular its relationship to Soviet and post-Soviet official and unofficial histories—and will be translating selected works of the contemporary Moscow poet Maria Stepanova. Stepanova’s poems are particularly attentive to what scholar Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory, the afterlife of historical catastrophe in the cultural and private unconscious.”
Ophelia Vedder ’18 received an English Teaching Assistantship in Madrid, Spain, and while there is looking forward to learning more about Spanish folk dancing.
Aja Procita ’18 will be journeying to Latvia to be an English teaching assistant. At Reed, she gained experience as a science and math teaching assistant and is excited to take those skills abroad. “Latvia has a unique cultural history and language which I'm looking forward to learning more about,” she said.
Genevieve Ward ’15 will head to Bulgaria to research Ottoman architectural legacies in Bulgarian historiography.
More than 100 Reedies have received Fulbright scholarships since the program was founded in 1946, averaging about one and a half Reed students who teach or do research via a Fulbright each year. Six Reedies were previously awarded Fulbright scholarships in 2005 and in 2011.
Tags: Alumni, Awards & Achievements, International, Life Beyond Reed, Students