Fulbright & Academic Collaborations
Roth Foundation Fulbright & Academic Collaborations include exchange-based project support scholarships and co-sponsorship of events and fellowships.
The first program the Roth Foundation established in the late-1980s consisted in small supplementary grants for projects being conducted in countries of special significance to Lois Roth. Organized in collaboration with the American Scandinavian Foundation (Denmark) and five Fulbright Commissions (in Australia, Finland, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden), these long formed the backbone of our exchange-based programming. In most cases, grantees are invited to submit a proposal for supplemental funding once they are settled, enabling them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and collaborations that arise. In celebration of our 35th anniversary in 2022, the Foundation extended this exchange-based program to three new partners: Fulbright Uruguay, Fulbright Ecuador and the Moroccan-American Commission for Education and Cultural Exchange (MACECE). With the help of these three partners, the Roth Foundation is also launching an pilot project to support US-bound Fulbrighters.
Non-exchange programs include the annual Fulbright Distinguished Lecture, in collaboration with the US-UK Fulbright Commission, Oxford University, Kings College London and the University of Edinburgh. Established in 2011, these lectures focus on international affairs and relations and have featured luminaries in different fields, including John Kerry, Devi Sridhar, David Miliband, Janet Napolitano, Lord Nicholas Stern, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Joseph Stiglitz, among others. A second non-exchange program, currently on hiatus, is the CASVA-Henry & Judith Millon Award, which helps support a research fellow at the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Research in the Visual Arts (CASVA).
Our Awards
Now in its 14th year, the Fulbright Distinguished Lecture features an annual lecture by prominent figures in international relations. It is co‐sponsored by the US‐UK Fulbright Commission, Pembroke College and the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford, Kings College London and the University of Edinburgh. The lecture honors the life and work of Senator J. William Fulbright, who spent four years at Pembroke College in Oxford, from 1924 to 1928. The 2024 Distinguished Lecture took place on June in a hybrid format – before an in-person audience at University of Oxford Pembroke College and simultaneously livestreamed.
On June 14, 2024, CNN host and best-selling author Dr. Fareed Zakaria spoke on “Towards a Post-American International Order.” A video of the lecture is available on the US-UK Fulbright Commission’s website.
Dr. Zakaria’s lecture delves into the dramatic shifts in the geopolitics we are currently witnessing. Almost 80 years on from the end of World War II, the international liberal order is under acute stress around the world while its main supporter, the United States, turns increasingly inward. He proposes the question to the audience: What is going to come next?
Dr. Fareed Zakaria is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, a columnist for The Washington Post, and a bestselling author. He has been nominated for several Emmys for his television work and has won one, along with the prestigious Peabody Award for his weekly CNN show. Since the debut of his show in 2008, it has featured interviews with several prominent figures including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Emmanuel Macron. Zakaria has authored five highly-regarded New York Times bestselling books: Age of Revolutions (2024), The Post-American World (2008), The Future of Freedom (2003), Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World (2020), and In Defense of a Liberal Education (2015). Before his tenure at CNN, Zakaria served as an editor of Newsweek International, a managing editor of Foreign Affairs, a columnist for Time, an analyst for ABC News, and the host of Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS. Zakaria holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, a doctorate in political science from Harvard University, and many numerous honorary degrees.
Project Grants
Programs that enable scholars and artists to live and work in other countries for a time are at the heart of international exchange and what we can understand as cultural diplomacy in a broader sense. Lois Roth worked with such programs throughout her career, both at the American Scandinavian Foundation and with the U.S. State Department. The Roth Foundation seeks to reinforce the service rendered by Fulbright and other such programs by offering supplementary support for projects in the social sciences and humanities, including the visual and performing arts. Project Support is awarded only in tandem with primary funding agencies and assists students, scholars and artists in taking advantage of opportunities that deepen their international experiences.
Inbound Support Grant
In response to the high cost of living in the U.S., which exacerbates challenges faced by all researchers, in 2025 we launched a pilot to explore providing more grants for U.S.-bound Fulbrighters. For the time being, this pilot grant will rotate each year among our three newest Project Support partners: the Fulbright Commissions in Ecuador, Morocco and Uruguay. However, we realize that there is a widespread need for this kind of support and hope ultimately to be able to offer grants for all of these countries. Moroccan doctoral student Inass Esshir was awarded the first grant of the pilot.
Inass’s research focuses on Moroccan storytelling and the work of Paul Bowles, an influential American who lived in Morocco for many years, studying its music and storytelling traditions. Through archival research in the Bowles collection at the University of Delaware in Newark, she is exploring notes on his unpublished, as well as published translations and on his relationships with the storytellers with whom he worked. With this added textual and contextual information, Inass hopes to both expand our awareness of Moroccan storytelling and reshape the scholarly understanding of Bowles’s work.
Support for U.S. Fulbrighters
Australia
The Roth Foundation provides supplementary support to one American Fulbrighter working in Australia each year, in collaboration with the Australian-American Fulbright Commission. The 2025 award went to Malvika Narayan.
Malvika’s research is rooted in dialogue—between clinicians and researchers, between institutions and public health systems, and between nations. A PhD candidate at Texas Tech University, she is undertaking a Fulbright in collaboration with the University of the Sunshine Coast to evaluate the Be Well Plan, an anti-burnout intervention for mental health clinicians. Through running synchronized control trials in the US and Australia, Malvika is able to investigate how the same intervention can be useful in starkly different healthcare systems. Funds from the Roth foundation will allow her to host a virtual symposium convening Australian and American stakeholders to share findings from parallel studies, reflect on cross-cultural insights, and strengthen binational strategies for improving mental health clinician wellbeing.
Upon returning to the US, Malvika intends to pilot the Be Well Plan at Texas Tech University and advocate to local governmental representatives for policies mitigating burnout.
Denmark
The Roth Foundation offers supplementary funds to a grantee of the American Scandinavian Foundation traveling to Denmark. This prize was instituted in honor of Lois Roth’s friend, Sonja Bungard-Nielsen, long-time director of the Danish American Foundation. In 2025, Dr. Bart Pushaw was selected as a recipient for the Award.
Most of the Inuit artworks that are the subject of Dr. Pushaw’s study are not in Greenland, taken and residing in collections in places as diverse as Oslo and Kansas. Dr. Bart Pushaw, of the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga researches, collates, historicizes, and analyzes these artworks in order to advocate for their return home.
Indulgent Images: Colonial Inuit Art and the Atlantic World is the first attempt in forty years to establish a critical corpus of Inuit art produced in Greenland between 1680 and 1900. As Dr. Pushaw’s first academic monograph, the project foregrounds close reading of historical art and expressive culture by Inuit makers to understand how Kalaallit Inuit envisioned futures for themselves and navigated colonialism in their own terms.
Funds from the Lois Roth Foundation will support Dr. Pushaw to collaborate with the Nuuk Art Museum, Inuit scholars, and community stakeholders to co-create knowledge on historical art and material culture, as well as study, consult, and photograph otherwise inaccessible artworks that are critical to his academic monograph.
Ecuador
The Roth Foundation provides supplementary support for projects in the social sciences and humanities, including the visual and performing arts to one American Fulbrighter working in Ecuador each year, in partnership with Comisión Fulbright del Ecuador. This year, we are pleased to announce two recipients, Derek Russell and Marielle Buxbaum.
Derek’s project, Cañ & Ara: Mending Climates with Vernacular Cosmovisions, aims to convene a 2-day Plurinational Craft Council that would include artisans and craftspeople from various indigenous nations to share architectural knowledge of indigenous construction.
Funding for this project will go towards covering the costs of artisan attendance and presentation of their work, event materials, as well as a donation of gratitude to the Seikoya community hosting the event.
Marielle Buxbaum’s Theatre for Youth Futures: Engaging Ecuadorian Urban Teens explores the social concerns of Ecuadorian youth. Marielle’s playwriting and theatre program engages with the therapeutic value of working with teens’ creative imaginations to process their own stories and work towards community change.
Support from the Lois Roth Foundation will fund the purchase of costumes and props for the theatre project, which can be used for future groups and productions.
Finland
A generous gift from Ann O. Thomson provides supplementary project support for up to two American Fulbrighters in Finland every year, in cooperation with the Fulbright Finland Foundation. The 2025 award went to Megan Thiede.
Megan Thiede is the 2025 Finland Project Support recipient for her research project to optimize the job application service lifecycle for individuals with cognitive and visual impairments. Megan is completing a Master of Social Sciences at Tampere University in sustainable societies and digitalisation, with a specialization in accessibility and diversity in digital services.
The Project Support award will fund Megan’s participation in the Green Innovators’ Challenge at the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées in France where she will conduct a research project on increasing university accessibility and developing sustainability strategies through site visits and workshops with sustainability experts. In addition, the award will assist her in attending the Smart Accessibility Conference in France, an annual convention of thought leaders, gathered to share research and insights about current accessibility challenges and techniques to enable equal opportunity.
Morocco
The Roth Foundation provides supplementary support for projects in the social sciences and humanities, including the visual and performing arts to one American Fulbrighter working in Morocco each year, in collaboration with Moroccan-American Commission for Education and Cultural Exchange (MACECE Fulbright Morocco).
Lydia Barrett, PhD researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, is the recipient of the 2025 Project Support Award Morocco for her project “Singing Resilience in the Climate Crisis: Women’s Musical Migration to Morocco. Lydia’s musical anthology research focuses on the sharing of songs by women migrants from across the African Continent.
With the support of the LRF award, Lydia aims to produce an anthology album of songs, as well as a companion website to share interviews, field recordings, and soundscapes. The album and companion website expand the scope of the project, inviting listeners from around the world into the artistic sound worlds of these women composers and performers.
New Zealand/Aotearoa
Project Support New Zealand Award honors the memory of Robin Winks, a founding board member of the Roth Foundation and Yale University history professor, and his New Zealander wife, Avril. Chelsea Wong won the Project Support Award for 2024.
A second generation Chinese-New Zealander, Chelsea Wong has noticed a limited representation and understanding of Asian New Zealander experiences in the arts and is passionate about connecting hearts and minds through arts to make a collective change. After nearly ten years working as an arts administrator, lawyer and policy maker, she is pursuing her master’s degree in American studies and Public Humanities at the Rutgers University in New Jersey. She will use the Robin and Avril Winks Award to support her research on Asian diaspora experiences in the arts.
After her Fulbright program, she hopes to return to New Zealand and contribute to the body of critical discussion about diaspora arts in Aotearoa, influence policy and programming in arts and culture, and make systemic change. Her long-term goal is to return to the public sector to devise cross-agency projects that further Asian Aotearoa Arts initiatives.
Norway
In collaboration with Fulbright Norway, the Roth Foundation grants an award to an American Fulbrighter in Norway every year. The 2025 award went to Ben Branaman.
Ben’s research in Norway involves studying the use of Electronic Monitoring (EM) as an alternative criminal sentencing practice, determining its impact on life outcomes, public safety and human rights. Working with Kriminalomsorgens Høgskole og Utdanningssenter (KRUS), Ben will examine experiences in Norway’s EM program through interviews with probation staff and incarcerated individuals using EM. Through these interviews, he hopes to understand how serving criminal sentences at home as opposed to in prison affects long-term life outcomes.
Prior to his Fulbright and LRF award Ben studied criminology, and plans to return to Arizona to use his research and experience in carceral environments in Norway to work towards a PhD and a career in prison reform research. Ben Ben hopes to use the knowledge gained from his Project Support activities in the US to influence methods of sentencing and impact recidivism rates.
Sweden
A generous gift from Ann O. Thomson, whom Lois referred to as her Swedish adoptive mother, provides supplementary project support for American Fulbrighters in Sweden every year. The 2025 awards were presented to Serafina Kennedy and Nicole Tong.
A graduate of Rutgers University, artist Serafina is collaborating with the Glass Factory in Boda Glasbruk to master Graal, a traditional Swedish glassblowing technique. Her project, “The Natural World through Allemansrätten, Graal, and Drawing,” is inspired by Sweden’s landscapes and the “Freedom to Roam” law (Allemansrätten). She is creating an extraordinary series of ink drawings and Graal sculptures, which will be showcased at the Glass Factory in June 2025 and at Rutgers University in the fall of 2025. The award will support her in acquiring materials and supplies essential for creating her Graal work and installing these stunning exhibitions in both Sweden and the U.S.
Nicole is currently pursuing graduate education at Stanford University. She aims to contribute to the development of ethical AI through her project, “Design of Artificial Intelligence Systems through Gender and Intersectionality.” Nicole’s research investigates the historical and modern discrimination faced by the Sámi people, with a focus on privacy and data.
Nicole will use the Award to develop educational materials demystifying AI for marginalized communities, collaborate with organizations focused on AI literacy, and present her findings at conferences.
Uruguay
The Roth Foundation seeks to reinforce the service rendered by Comisión Fulbright Uruguay by offering supplementary support for projects in the social sciences and humanities, including the visual and performing arts. The 2025 award went to Juliana Merullo.
Juliana Merullo, a recent Brown University graduate, is collaborating with Universidad de la República to document voices and perspectives of Uruguayan cattle farmers in an oral history archive. She hopes to capture their experiences of the current transition and change to the tradition of cattle grazing as a result of the recent governments’ efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
With the help of the 2025 Project Support Award Uruguay, she will be able to expand on her online archive to publish interviews on Uruguayan radio stations and American podcasts. As Juliana notes, “I am excited about the prospect of bringing more attention – within Uruguay and beyond – to the stories of these rural cattle farmers and their families, overcoming language barriers and cultural divides in the process.”
The Henry And Judith Millon Award
The Henry and Judith Millon Award helps support the residency of a foreign architectural historian at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), part of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The award is named after Henry Millon—Roth Foundation founding Roth Foundation Board member and CASVA founder‐director—and his wife, Judy.
We are grieved at the passing of Henry A. Millon in 2018. The program was on hiatus last year, but we look forward to starting up again, with renewed purpose, in 2019.