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News Release

Last modified: Thursday, January 26, 2012

Ten faculty at Indiana University awarded Fulbright grants for teaching and research worldwide

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan. 26, 2012

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Ten faculty members at Indiana University have been awarded Fulbright grants for the 2011-12 academic year.

The Fulbright recipients represent three IU campuses -- Bloomington, Indianapolis and Fort Wayne -- and their research and academic activity take place in countries across the globe such as Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Japan, Peru, Russia Sweden and Turkey.

This year's recipients stem from a range of departments and schools, including the Kelley School of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington. They include scholars of design, finance, folklore and ethnomusicology, journalism, political science, physics and religious studies.

Recipients of faculty and staff Fulbright awards for the 2011-12 academic year are:

• Mark W. McK. Bannatyne, chair of the Department of Design and Communication Technology at IUPUI, who gave lectures and professional development workshops in the fall at the University of Communication and Management in Poznan, Poland. He also provided workshops on diverse computer graphics topics to 19 high schools throughout the Wielkopolska province and helped public school teachers develop instructional materials for a computer graphics curriculum.
• Ulf Jonas Bjork, a professor of journalism at IUPUI, who will teach this spring at Uppsala University in Sweden as the Fulbright Uppsala Distinguished Chair in American Studies. He will teach a course in U.S. mass media and collaborate on a book project about the Americanization of Sweden with colleagues at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies.
• William Bianco, professor of political science at IU Bloomington, who is spending a year in Russia to research the space program and to compare flight rules under NASA and the Russian space program. His activities have included interviews with staff from both space programs and the possible establishment of a joint project with the school that trains Russian flight controllers.
• Michael Dylan Foster, assistant professor of folklore at IU Bloomington, who will live in Japan for eight months while he pursues research for a book project, "Visiting Strangers: Gods, Ethnographers, and Tourists in Japan." The project explores the intersection of festival, ethnography and tourism, with a particular focus on local rituals in which masked demon-deity figures visit community households.
• Lynn Hooker, assistant professor of Central Eurasian studies and an adjunct professor of folklore and musicology at IU Bloomington, who will research the role of Romani (Gypsy) musicians in Hungarian society, especially during the socialist period. She will conduct oral history interviews with musicians, do archival research on the nationalization of the music industry and observe present-day music events.
• Stephen L. Selka, an assistant professor in the departments of religious studies and American studies at IU Bloomington, who will spend the spring in Brazil studying the engagements between Afro-Brazilian religious practice, specifically the Afro-Catholic festival of the Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death in northeastern Brazil, and various enterprises grounded in the discourse of cultural heritage.
• Richard L. Shockley, CenterPoint Energy Faculty Fellow and an associate professor of finance at IU Bloomington, who will spend the spring on the faculty at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. While in Turkey, he plans to study how the structures of Islamic financing arrangements affect the liquidity, stability and scale of a banking system.
• Regina Smyth, associate professor of political science and a faculty member in the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at IU Bloomington, who will be affiliated with the Department of Political Science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. While in Russia, she will continue her research on the effect of electoral competition on regime development in Russia, observing the 2011-12 parliamentary and presidential election cycles.
• Desiderio Vasquez, associate professor of physics at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, who will contribute to the development of a Computational Nonlinear Science Program at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima.
• Rachel M. Wheeler, associate professor of religious studies at IUPUI, who is spending the year teaching in the American Studies Department at the Johannes Gutenberg University at Mainz, Germany. She also is working on a full-length biography of a Mohican-Moravian man named Joshua, 1742-1806, who lived through the religious revivals and wars of the 18th century.

"The continued success of our faculty who are selected as Fulbright scholars underscores IU's engagement efforts worldwide," said David Zaret, IU vice president for international affairs. "We are proud of our scholars who will represent the university worldwide, while adding to the depth of their knowledge for the betterment of our students in Indiana."

Fulbright awards for faculty and staff are managed by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars. The CIES Core Scholar Program for faculty sends about 800 faculty and professionals to countries around the world.

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