Top ten scholars selected for US exchange

Top ten scholars selected for US exchange

Ten top New Zealand academics and artists have been selected for Fulbright exchanges to the United States of America in 2010. Fulbright New Zealand has announced the selection of eight Fulbright New Zealand Senior Scholars and two Fulbright Visiting Scholars in New Zealand Studies for next year. They will research and teach in fields as diverse as medical storytelling, military history, occupational therapy and the cultural identities of immigrants’ children.

The eight Fulbright New Zealand Senior Scholars include second time Fulbrighter Laurence Aberhart, who previously received a 1988 Fulbright New Zealand Cultural Development Grant to take photographs while travelling the length of the Mississippi and throughout the southern states of the US. This time he will focus his attention on the Atlantic Seaboard states and visit whaling ports from which fleets sailed to New Zealand and the South Seas in the early 1800s, with a view to unearthing and photographing New Zealand artefacts and materials collected by early American whalers.

Other grantees selected as Fulbright New Zealand Senior Scholars for 2010 include leading New Zealand poet Glenn Colquhoun, a practising physician who will continue the longstanding relationship between creative writing and medicine by visiting narrative medicine and medical humanities programmes at Harvard, Columbia and Pennsylvania State Universities, with the aim of helping establish a similar programme at the University of Auckland upon his return.

Military historian Glynn Harper, Director of Massey University’s Centre for Defence Studies, will spend five months at the Virginia Military Institute conducting research to reappraise the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino, a battle which is central to New Zealand’s military history and remains one of the most controversial military actions of World War II.

Linda Wilson from Otago Polytechnic will lecture and research changes in occupational therapy, at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire. She is the first Fulbright scholar in the field of occupational therapy, which has undergone major changes in its 60 year history in New Zealand, and the only Fulbright New Zealand Senior Scholar this year from a polytechnic.

Two Fulbright Visiting Scholars in New Zealand Studies for 2010 have also been announced, who will conduct research in their own field of interest and teach an undergraduate course in New Zealand studies at Georgetown University’s Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies, as part of Fulbright New Zealand’s ongoing commitment to provide the Center with a visiting scholar each semester. Dr Doug Pratt from the University of Waikato’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies will teach a course on religion in New Zealand for Georgetown University’s Spring semester from January to May 2010, while researching the combined areas of religious plurality and religious extremism with particular reference to Islam and Christianity. He will be replaced in the Fall semester from August to December by Professor Lydia Wevers from Victoria University of Wellington’s Stout Research Centre, who will teach a course on contemporary New Zealand fiction and research the interactions and links between contemporary New Zealand fiction and America.

ENDS

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