Three UA Faculty Members Awarded Fulbright Grants

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Three faculty members from the University of Arkansas are among the 850 Fulbright Scholars who have been lecturing and doing research at foreign institutions during the 2005-06 school year.

The Council for International Exchange of Scholars, which administers the Fulbright program, also announced that three international scholars will be lecturing and conducting research at the University of Arkansas through the program.

Christopher R. Kelley, an associate professor of law in the School of Law, is lecturing on administrative, environmental and natural resources law at the Kharkiv National Agrarian University in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Kelley is director of the National Center for Agricultural Law and Research Information, which is based at the University of Arkansas.

Judith Ricker, a professor of foreign languages in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, participated in a Fulbright German Studies Seminar during the summer at the German-American Fulbright Commission in Berlin. Ricker has taught German and French at the University of Arkansas since 1980.

Charles Patrick West, a professor of crop, soil and environmental sciences in the College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences, is doing research on the endophyte role in sustaining tall fescue persistence in the Mediterranean basin. He is based at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Montpelier, France.

Three Fulbright scholars also arrived this semester at the University of Arkansas to do research.

Lucian Daniel Dragut, a senior lecturer in the department of geography at West University of Timisoara, Romania, is researching a new method of representing landscape: segmentation of three-dimensional landscape units for environmental applications. Dragut is working with the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology at the university.

Hayat Kara, a professor of Arabic language at Mohamed V University at Rabat, Morocco, is researching the Andalusian Sufi poet Al-Mirtulli al-Zahid as a historical archetype and symbolic figure. Kara is working with the Middle East Studies program at the university.

Mohammed Suleiman Ahmad Shunnaq, an associate professor of anthropology at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, is researching information technology and socio-cultural change as it applies to an anthropological study of Irbid City, Jordan, and Fayetteville, Ark. Shunnaq is based in the sociology department in the Fulbright College.

Collis Geren, dean of the Graduate School and vice chancellor for research at the University of Arkansas, said the university usually has one or two professors per year who receive Fulbright grants.

"This is the first time I have seen three from here going overseas and three from overseas coming here in a single year," he said. "This indicates that the
university is, indeed, becoming world class."

The Fulbright Scholar Program, the nation’s flagship international educational exchange program, is administered under the U.S. Department of State with additional funding coming from participating governments and host institutions. The legislation that created the scholarship program was introduced by Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas in 1946.

The program’s purpose is to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries. Final selections are made by the presidentially appointed J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which also formulates policy for the program.