Extension grants 2022

Congratulations to the 8 Fulbright grantees who have been selected to receive one of three extension grants by the French-American Commission.

The Arthur King Peters Travel Grant.  Created in 2001 in memory of the former president of the French-American Foundation of New York and Fulbright grantee in literature, this grant finances the research-related travel of five Fulbrighters per year.

• Haley Bertram, Doctoral student in archeology from the University of Cincinnati and Fulbright advanced student at the Université de Bordeaux Montaigne .  Project:  Archaic Corinth and the West: A case study at Massalia and Saint Blaise.  Haley’s Arthur King Peters Memorial project will develop her work as a Fulbright grantee this year, in which she has been studying Corinthian pottery excavated from the colonial zone of Marseille (ancient Massalia) in southern France. The travel grant will allow Haley to live in Marseille for a month to study the unpublished ceramics from recent rescue excavations around the city. She will also visit Iron Age hillforts along the southern coast, where local populations imported Corinthian vessels for drinking, serving, or carrying perfumed oil, to use alongside their own pottery. Haley aims to draw on these ceramic assemblages at both the colonial and indigenous settlements to reconstruct a more inclusive, balanced narrative of the reciprocal impact of exchange in the western Mediterranean. The research will form the basis for a chapter of her dissertation, “Producing for the Mediterranean World: Corinthian Pottery Abroad, 750-450 BCE.”

• Simon Frisch, Doctoral student in music from the Juilliard School and Fulbright-Harriet Hale Woolley grantee at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris and at the Fondation des États-Unis.  Project : "Deux fois reine" : The Political and Musical Legacy of Anne de Bretagne.  With the support of the Arthur King Peters grant, Simon will spend spring and early summer on creative pursuits and academic research between the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP), the Fondation des États-Unis, and various institutions outside of Paris(the Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, archives in Nantes and Brittany, and various workshops specific to Renaissance training). The focus of these efforts is the cultural and political history of music at the French court in the early16th century, a time of enormous artistic influence from the chapel of Anne of Brittany (and her king-successor, Francis I).These studies in turn inform compositional work that is inspired by, and in turn illuminates, the expressive elements of notation and musical style in such works. The culminating events will be a profile concert of new compositions at the Fondation des États-Unis and several talks showcasing creative work and research.

• Kenz Kallal, Fulbright advanced student in mathematics at the Université Paris-Saclay.  Project : "p-adic Hodge theory" Thanks to the Arthur King Peters extension grant, Kenz will attend two summer conferences related to his research: one aboutp-adic Hodge theory held at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques in Luminy (near Marseille), and one about the Langlands program held at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette (near Paris).

• Lexie Russo, Fulbright advanced student in history from New York University at the Centre international de recherches sur les esclavages, CNRS.   Project : "The Politics of Care: Decolonization and Women's Work inFrance, 1945-1981"   In the decades following the Second World War, the French state recruited many thousands of women from France’s overseas departments as domestic workers for the mainland labor market. Lexie's project situates this unprecedented government action in context to question how domestic labor became integral to quotidian processes of decolonization and postwar reconstruction. By tracing the relationships between migrants and their employers, she probes how these groups negotiated the racial politics of the home and examines the consequences of such personal and economic ties on the making of a postcolonial France. With the support of the Arthur King Peters Memorial Travel Grant, Lexie will travel to Martinique,Guadeloupe, and La Réunion to pursue historical research.

• Kimberly Tower, Fulbright advanced student in political science from American University at Sciences Po-Paris . Project : "Campaigning for Kebabs: Identity, Local Commerce & Political Behavior in Toulouse, France.  Kimberly's Fulbright project deals with two chapters of her dissertation, examining food as a symbol of national and cultural identity in French politics. Building on previous large-N statistical analyses, which compare an original dataset of restaurants across France to voter choice for far-right candidates, Kimberly's grant period has focused on how causal mechanisms operate in a local context. She has used participant observation and semi-structured interviews in five "emblematic" and "outlier" towns across the greater Île-de-France region to understand: under what conditions does far-right discourse successfully frame "foreign" food as a symbolic threat to French identity? When does it not? And when does that symbolism translate into observable political action? The Arthur King Peters Travel Award will allow Kimberly to conduct "out-of-sample" testing in and around Toulouse, France, providing a critical robustness check on the framework she developed during the first few months of her Fulbright grant. The grant extension provided by this award will also enable Kimberly to observe the role of food as a political symbol over the course of the 2022 French presidential elections. Kimberly's Fulbright project is supported through a co-affiliation with the CEVIPOF research center at Sciences Po - Paris and the LaSSP and LEREPS research centers at Sciences Po - Toulouse.

Prix Arnaud Roujou de Boubée : Created in 2021 in memory of the former director of the French-American Commission, this grant allows one US student in France and one French student in the US to extend their stays by two months.

• Daniel Tran, advanced student in immunology at the Université de Paris-Cité.  Project:  As part of his internship in immunology at the Hôpital Bichat in Paris, Dan will continue his research on vaccines against Pseudomonas.  He will conduct experiments on mice with a vaccine including the protein PopB, which stimulates the T helper cells.  This sort of protein has shown its effectiveness in other vaccines but has not yet tried in connection to Pseudomonas. 

• Maryne Rondot, advanced student in psychology at Columbia University, New York.   Project : Maryne was recent selected to undertake an independent research project under the supervision of Dr Greene, psychiatrist and professor who directs the Health and Migration department of the School of Public Health at Columbia University.  She will set up culturally adapted mental health program for victims of gender violence in refugee camps in Tanzania and in displaced populations of Ethiopia.

Prix Rosalind Swenson.  Created in 2016 in memory of the former director of the Fulbright office at the US State Department, this prize allows one American grantee to spend an extra month in France to pursue a project related to diversity, leadership, innovation, social entrepreneurship or mutual understanding. 

• Tom Gurin is a Fulbright advanced student from Yale University who is currently artist in residence at the Fondation des États Unis and recipient of the Fulbright-Harriet Hale Woolley award in the arts studying at the École Normale de Musique à Paris.  Project: « La Musique en Plein Air : Street Art and Public Music in Paris ».    Tom Gurin will compose and perform the music for a youth-oriented community arts project aimed at encouraging children and teens to read and to picture themselves as leaders in their communities. This piece will contribute to an existing mural art series depicting young community members as heroes in young adult fantasy novels. Adding a musical dimension to this theme, Gurin will compose and perform a work that uses physical books as percussion instruments. The composition will utilize the full range of sounds that hardcover and paperback volumes can produce, as well as amplification and live electronic processing to build textures and layers of rhythm. In addition to creating innovative music that inspires and engages with the young audience, this project aims to empower young leaders by boosting interest in books as dynamic materials for storytelling.