In an enlightening exchange in May 2024, Meryem Hammam—Chief of Staff of MACECE (the Moroccan-American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange)—described the financial situation facing international Fulbrighters, despite a recent raise in stipends to offset inflation, due to the high cost of living in the U.S. This can exacerbate a challenge faced by all researchers, for whom invitations to attend conferences or whose projects would benefit from complementary research are outside their budget. In response to this conversation, we launched a pilot to explore providing more grants for U.S.-bound Fulbrighters working in the humanities, arts and (qualitative) social sciences.
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archival research in the Bowles collection at the University of Delaware in Newark, she is exploring notes on his unpublished, as well as published translations and on his relationships with the storytellers with whom he worked.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.
We don’t usually get to meet our Project Support grantees. It was therefore with great pleasure that our board members Marti Estell and Anne Barbaro joined Inass, as well as MACECE’s Rebecca Geffner and Meryem Hammam for lunch in Washington DC on February 14!
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. But 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.
These days, it feels like a greater privilege than ever to help people and create positive growth. If you would like to support the creation and continuation of these Project Support Grants, please get in touch or make an earmarked donation today!
