Dr. Gary Edwards receives Fulbright Senior Fellowship for 2009-10; will teach in Berlin

August 21, 2009 -- Dr. Gary Edwards, assistant professor of history at Arkansas State University, has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Fellowship in American Studies. Edwards will lecture as a visiting member of the faculty at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies located at the Free University of Berlin during the 2009-2010 academic year, according to the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Edwards won the fellowship after extensive evaluation by academic review boards in Washington, D.C. and Berlin. His proposal, "Race, Republicanism, and Ruralism: A Historical Narrative on Contemporary American Identity," highlights the paradoxical nature of personal liberty and societal order in a nascent democracy. It is designed to challenge German students to examine the U.S. past in order to understand its present. He will teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the American South, the Civil War, and the Early American Republic. In addition to his teaching duties, Edwards will continue researching and writing his first book on farming families of antebellum Tennessee.

The Kennedy Institute is a premier venue for American Studies in Europe, and Dr. Edwards is one of a select group of U.S. faculty who annually travel abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. Likewise, the Free University of Berlin has a storied intellectual reputation, including the setting where physicists first demonstrated uranium atoms could be split in the 1930s. Later, the Free University of Berlin emerged as a potent symbol of academic freedom during the Cold War.

The Fulbright Program, America's flagship international educational exchange program, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has provided approximately 294,000 people -- 108,160 of them Americans who have studied, taught, or researched abroad, and 178,340 students, scholars, and teachers from other countries who have engaged in similar activities in the U.S. -- with the opportunity to observe each other's political, economic, educational and cultural institutions, to exchange ideas, and to embark on joint ventures of importance to the general welfare of the world's inhabitants.

For further information about the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of States Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, visit the Fulbright website, contact James A. Lawrence, Office of Academic Exchange Programs, (202) 453-8531, or e-mail fulbright@state.gov.

-- release courtesy of the Fulbright Program, U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Washington, D.C.
 

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