“Embrace the Unexpected”
Celebrating 75 Years of Fulbright Stories In celebration of the Fulbright Program’s 75th anniversary, we’re looking back at the experiences of Fulbrighters Dr. Sudha Haley and Aparna Keshaviah. We asked the two alumnae about their experiences abroad with Fulbright, their shared expertise in classical Indian dance, and their advice for the next generation of Fulbright artists. Dr. Sudha […]
The Shakers and Tagore Dance – Leslie Friedman – India 1984
December, 1983. I arrived in India, a Fulbright Lecturer affiliated with Viswa Bharati University, West Bengal. It is Nobel Prize poet Tagore’s university. Mrs Das Gupta from Fulbright/Calcutta took me to the train to Santineketan. A gorgeous carriage met me. Dance Department Directors, men in colorful, exquisite costumes, greeted me as though I […]
On the ‘Rez’ – Nafeesa Fathima Moinuddin – USA 2002
The award of the Fulbright Pre-doctoral Fellowship in 2001 supported my research on Native American literature and gave me the opportunity to experience the tribal lifestyles that I had read about in novels by authors such as Momaday, Welch, and Silko. The principal theme of these works is the deep-rooted attachment between the narrator and […]
Following In My Father’s Footsteps – Sandhya Rao – India 2008
My Fulbright experience in India in spring 2008 allowed me to reconnect and give back to my old country. Since I moved to the United States in 1989, winds of liberalization had blown over India, rapidly changing the economic, social, cultural and mass media scenes. I had seen mere glimpses of these changes during my […]
Secluded in Orangeburg – Vijay Prakash Singh – USA 2019
The time of the early pandemic was one of safe seclusion for me, far away from the dance of death taking place in the bigger cities like Chicago or New York. I had a 60s ranch house with a magnolia tree and a cypress in the front and several pines and a maple in the […]
Exacting – Rebecca Kaiser Gibson – India 2011
The Center for Exact Humanities (CEH) was the department at IIIT-H, an information technology school where I was scheduled to teach a semester of Creative Writing, Poetry as a Fulbright Scholar in 2012. My second night in Hyderabad, Prakani, the young guide assigned me, announced that I was invited to meet “Sir,” Navjoti Singh, the […]
India: Where Do I Start? – Dr. Brad Wideman – India 1975
Five hundred words could never capture the sounds, the flavor of its food, its rainbow of colors nor the uniqueness of its people. In 1975, I received a 9-week Fulbright Fellowship to study the “History and Culture of India.” The trip took me from New Delhi, to Agra, to Varanasi, to Kolkata, to Chennia, and […]
Vivid Memories- Colleen A Kelly – India 1967 & 1984
In 1967, I was a young secondary school teacher, newly awarded an MA in history from St. John’s University. I decided I might try for a Fulbright study opportunity. To my surprise and pleasure I was given a place in the Institute for Indian History and Culture. This Fulbright for educators involved studying throughout the […]