2 Cornellians awarded Fulbright grants

A Cornell College senior and a 2012 alumna have both earned places in the highly-competitive Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship program.

Bekah Kurtz, who graduated in May, will travel to New Delhi to teach English. Eva Fisk ’12 will travel to Morocco.

Kurtz previously spent a semester in India as part of the School for International Training’s study abroad program. For most of the program she stayed with a family in Jaipur and learned about the country’s developing economy. She also spent a month in Himachal Pradesh, a state in the far north of the country. While there she studied self-help groups, which are small groups of women who contribute money to a pool and give out small loans to members or to businesses in the community.

Kurtz worked with Laura Farmer, writing studio director, and history Professor Robert Givens, Cornell’s Fulbright Program Advisor, on her application. Kurtz said she met with Farmer eight times in two weeks as she prepared her statements for the Fulbright application.

Fisk will teach English language education and American studies for one year at a Moroccan university. On the side, she said, she will be studying Arabic and working on research related to bridge building between language, culture, and gender.

“I am really interested in how culture and linguistic diversity is addressed in women’s advocacy groups in Morocco,” she said. “Part of my senior year at Cornell was spent studying gender and development, which is what really sparked my interest in going to Morocco.”

After her experience, she plans to apply to a cultural and political doctorate program and research transformative movements across North Africa and West Africa.

The pair make 11 Cornellians in the past 10 years to be Fulbright students. Previous Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship participants include Tiffany Monreal ’14, who taught in South Korea, Emily Wenger ’14 and Will Dinneen ’12, who both taught in Turkey, and Chris Stadler ’12, who taught in Germany.

The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and was established in 1946 to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries, through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills.