Five faculty members will have an opportunity to conduct research abroad thanks to Fulbright Scholar grants.

They recently were selected for academic or professional achievement and extraordinary leadership potential. They are Tom Fricke, professor of anthropology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research; Elisha Renne, an associate professor of anthropology, and Afroamerican and African Studies; Derek Vaillant, associate professor of communication studies; Madeleine Vala, lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature; and Joan Mars, associate professor of criminal justice at U-M-Flint.

Fricke‘s four-month research will begin this fall on “Narrative, Politics and Modernity in Christian Conversation in Nepal.” He’ll study Tamang villagers who have converted to Evangelical Protestant and Catholic forms of Christianity as a pivot linking culture to individual experience and the politics of modernity.

“The Fulbright represents an opportunity to continue my study of cultural change with people that I have been working with for 24 years,” he says.

Renne is spending July through September at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Her project, “New Technologies of Embroidered Robe Production in Zaria, Nigeria,” includes analysis of clothing fashions produced and marketed in Nigeria, and gender associations with work and technology in Zaria. “Receiving the Fulbright Research Fellowship to work with Dr. Salihu Maiwada is very gratifying, as we first met in 1994 when I came to Zaria as a Fulbright lecturer/researcher,” she says. “Since then, we’ve kept in touch and are pleased to be able to work together on this project.”

Vaillant will research “Radio Broadcasting in France and the United States: The Politics of Culture, Race and Nation, 1928-68” while visiting the Institute of Human Sciences of Aquitaine in Bordeaux, France. Vaillant, whose fellowship is from September 2005-March 2006, will concentrate on pre-World War II and post-war periods.

“I am delighted and honored to be selected as a Fulbright Research Scholar,” Vaillant says. “It affords the precious commodity of time to research a new project devoted to the politics of Franco-American cultural and technological exchange in the 20th century.”

Vala will teach courses on 19th-century American literature and contemporary American popular culture at the University of Leipzig in Germany, April-August 2006. Her project is “From Henry James to Reality Television: Teaching American Literature and Culture in Germany.” She also plans to study 19th-century fiction by German immigrants to the United States.

“I look forward to learning about American literature and culture from a distinct perspective, and I know that I will learn much from my German students that I cannot anticipate now,” Vala says.

Mars will research “U.S. Immigration and Deportation: Caribbean Aliens and the Criminal Justice Process” at the Center for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of the West Indies—St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Her nine-month fellowship begins in August.

“This award will provide me with the opportunity to study the impact of U.S. immigration laws and policies on the rapidly expanding deportee population in Trinidad and Tobago, and facilitate comparative analyses with the findings of similar research conducted in Guyana,” she says.