The Fulbright Scholar Program has granted the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award to four University of Idaho professors for the 2024-25 academic year.
According to its website, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is the largest fellowship program for U.S. scholars. The program offers “over 400 awards in more than 135 countries for U.S. citizens to teach, conduct research, and carry out professional projects around the world.” The Fulbright Program has allowed more than 400,000 professionals from various backgrounds to perform research abroad.
This is the first time since 2019 that the university has had as many as four scholars selected, with the record being five in 2019.
The scholars are John Crepeau, Zachary Turpin, Brian Wolf, and Elowyn Yager.
According to a press release, Crepeau is a professor of mechanical engineering at UI who plans to research sustainable aviation fuels at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He will work with students to optimize performance in aviation fuels in an effort to make them more sustainable.
Turpin is an associate professor of English. He will be conducting research and performing teaching activities at Technische Universität Dortmund in Dortmund, Germany. Turpin’s project is named “Intercultural Approaches to Translating Walt Whitman.” It will consist of collaboration between himself and students to study the “evolving approaches (over the last century-plus) to translating American poet Walt Whitman’s dictionary-scouring verse,” as a press release summarizes. This project will examine the unique words that the poet coined himself, such as “venerealee” and “fatherstuff.”
Wolf is a professor of criminology and will be traveling to the University of Oslo to work with the Center for Research on Extremist Violence. His research will examine the problem of “extremist violence in advanced and developed democracies,” as per a press release. The project will allow Wolf to analyze responses to extremist violence in Europe as a whole and in Norway. The outcome of this research will be used to assess causes and solutions to extremist violence that occurs in North America.
Yager is a civil and environmental engineering professor and the co-director of the Center for Ecohydraulics Research. Along with other international professionals, she will conduct experiments at the University of Trento in Italy to study how vegetation roots impact the strength of riverbanks. These experiments will measure root strength and collect data from well-studied Italian rivers.
For additional information about the Fulbright Scholar Program, visit fulbrightprogram.org.
Rebekah Weaver can be reached at [email protected].