The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs has awarded Bucknell University with the accolades of a top producer of Fulbright Scholars for the second year in a row. Usually this is given to educational institutions with the highest number of 2022-23 Fulbright scholars. They are made up of faculty, researchers and administrators chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential. 

Bucknell’s most contemporary awardees are Prof. Emily Martin and Diane Jakacki, who are performing international research projects for their part of the program. 

Provost Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak said that,“Bucknell’s repeated recognition as a top producer of Fulbright Scholars serves as a testament to the caliber of faculty and staff at Bucknell. Our students are able to thrive in a challenging learning community because of the way they are encouraged toward discovery and global understanding by educators who are curious learners themselves.”

The Fulbright scholarship is meant to further efforts to make students aware of more global perspectives, and they allow for professors and researchers to travel abroad, perform research, and return to their students with a greater awareness and understanding of the world around them.

Prof. Martin is using her Fulbright scholarship to teach American and Canadian art song to students at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague in the Netherlands.

“In a lot of European conservatories, because English is not their first language, they tend to focus on very traditional Western canon classical music: Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, but they don’t have a lot of experience and exposure to American or Canadian art song,” Martin said, in a press release. 

Prof. Martin is also traveling to sing in locales such as Iceland, Vienna, and London with the freedom the scholarship gives her. She added that, “The thing I’m looking more forward to, more than anything, is just re-energizing my creativity and coming up with new ideas to bring back.”

Diane Jakacki is the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and she is looking into early modern performances with her Fulbright scholarship. She is working with REED London, a digital database that contains old documents about London musical and theatrical performances that took place between A.D. 1200-1650. She is partnered with the Canadian Writing Research Laboratory and the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship for this project.

“This Fulbright scholarship is allowing me to tackle the really hard questions a lot of us have been addressing when we’re thinking about digital humanities and linked data — the idea of what determines an event from both a broad and granular perspective,” Jakacki said. “My work will bring value to other scholars by creating parameters that help define and record these events. It’s one of the most exciting things about the Fulbright. The work I’m doing can be applied and extrapolated, and other researchers can use these concepts that I am thinking about.”

The Fulbright Program was established almost a century ago in order to aid in mutual understanding between the United States and other countries. In addition to the U.S. Congress funding the program, there are also donations made from partner governments, NGOs, private organizations, and corporations.