Idaho State University Students and Professors Study and Teach Across the Globe with Fulbright Awards

The Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s premier global educational exchange enterprise, offers, in partnership with numerous countries, a unique opportunity for students, professors and administrators to live, research and teach abroad. Recent ISU graduate Wesley Peterson spent the first six months of 2021 teaching English in the Canary Islands with his Fulbright award. Previous ISU graduates have received Fulbrights for Sweden, Finland, and Mexico, among other countries. This past spring, ISU professors Joshua Swift (Psychology) and Matthew Levay (English) completed a combination of research and teaching awards in, respectively, Taiwan and Poland. 

This term (Fall 2022), ISU associate professor of civil engineering Mustafa Mashal is a Fulbright US Scholar in Doha, Qatar, in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering at Qatar University, where he will combine research and teaching in his specialty, concrete materials and structures. Mashal writes: "Qatar will be the first Middle Eastern country to host the FIFA World Cup this year. Its national vision for 2030 is to sustain its development while providing a high standard of living for its people. Qatar's strategic vision to have harmony between economic growth, social development and environmental protection . . . resonate[s] well with me as a civil engineer who deals with the design of resilient and sustainable infrastructure." 

Professor of English Alan Johnson heads to Gujarat, India next term (Spring 2023) as a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar to examine pilgrimage narratives written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This interest grew out of the research for his forthcoming (January 2023) book India’s Forests, Real and Imagined, which was supported by a previous Fulbright-Nehru award.

These recent and current Fulbright grantees illustrate the rich opportunities available through the Fulbright Program. If you are interested in applying for a 2023-24 award, now is the time to do it. ISU students, whether senior undergraduates or graduate students, should immediately contact the campus advisor, Dr. Alan Johnson, at alanjohnson@isu.edu. Johnson is also glad to advise faculty members and ISU alumni about the program and application process. The Fulbright Program website for students is: https://us.fulbrightonline.org/; and for faculty and administrators: https://fulbrightscholars.org/. More information is available on the ISU Fulbright page.