Awardee Database

Awardees

Claire With

As the Resource Coordinator, U.S. Embassy Oslo, Claire was instrumental in the October 2023 opening of the American Presence Post in Tromso, Norway, based on her years of experience understanding the most effective ways to engage the disparate communities of the Arctic. Over Claire’s long career she has continuously demonstrated her commitment to the development of cultural understanding between the two countries. 

Counselor for Public Affairs Jillian F. Bonnardeaux, Claire’s nominator, commends her role as the senior-most member of the Public Diplomacy Section as the indispensable institutional memory for the hundreds of grantees and cultural programs over the decades.

Valentyna Pashkova

As a 20-year veteran of Embassy Kyiv’s Public Diplomacy Section, Valentyna Pashkova exemplifies the highest standards of creativity, passion, and commitment to cultural and educational diplomacy. As the American Spaces Program Specialist, she has been instrumental in developing and sustaining the network of 26 American centers, shelves, and spaces across Ukraine that are a model for other Eastern European countries. Valentyna’s long career at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv has been marked by unyielding creativity and steadfast commitment, benefiting both U.S. direct hires and local staff. Her embodiment of cross-cultural sensitivity, patience, wisdom, generosity, and humanity make her an exemplary recipient of the Jodie Lewinsohn Career Achievement Award.

Dler Hamad

Dler’s breadth of work at the U.S. Consulate General Erbil includes supervising the entire cultural, educational, outreach, and grants unit, advancing issues as diverse and critical as women’s rights, climate change, educational reform, economic development, civil society training, and much more. In 2024, As the Public Engagement Specialist, Dler supercharged the English language programs, won a complicated multi-year grant competition to help Kurdish universities counter Chinese influence and served as a trusted, compassionate advisor and advocate on human rights. In these and many other ways Dler clearly, measurably advanced U.S. policy while making a positive difference in the lives of many people in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Alison Moylan

The 2024 Ilchman-Richardson award goes to Alison Moylan, Deputy Director, Office of International Visitors, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), U.S. State Department, Washington, DC. 

To paraphrase from Alison’s nomination by Amy Storrow: In the twenty-five years that Alison has served the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, she has modeled patience, wisdom and generosity in her interactions with tens of thousands of exchange program visitors and hundreds of ECA employees. 

Alison has created an inclusive workplace where employees feel valued – as evidenced by IVLP’s exceptional retention rate of Department staff – and her versatile skill set allows her to liaise at the highest levels within the Department, host prominent visitors in her home, and help staff manage the smallest details of their projects at all hours, making her a consummate public diplomacy leader in both words and deeds.

Thank you, Alison, for exemplifying the legacies of former Assistant Secretaries Alice Ilchman and John Richardson.

Jeff Barrus

Jeff received the 2024 Lois Roth Award honorable mention for, as Deputy Chief of Mission Emily Fleckner lauds, his success working in one of the most restrictive operating environments in the world. As the Public Affairs Officer for the U.S. Embassy Bandar Seri Begawan, he is recognized for his implementation of an exceptionally creative ECA Sports Diplomacy program to break a decades-long taboo against women playing soccer in Brunei Darussalam. He is also recognized for exceptional advancement of U.S. foreign policy through other cultural and educational initiatives focused on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility, including empowering a severely marginalized LGBTQI+ community and creating the first interfaith Iftar in Brunei’s history. The programs Jeff created and led changed lives for the better in Brunei. 

Sarah Ziebell

The 2024 Lois Roth Award for excellence in cultural diplomacy goes to Sarah Ziebell, Regional Public Engagement Specialist for the Balkans.

Sarah is recognized for her ability to see interesting and unexpected program opportunities and her practical skills to get things done. Colleagues see Sarah as a smart manager, a thoughtful innovator, and a strategic thinker who is, at the same time, capable, creative and collaborative. She has devised ways to address the unique challenges each Balkan country faces, particularly regarding disinformation, such as with the Digital Literacy Forum program. IN addition to managing 60+ American spaces, she launched the first-ever program to engage the Russian war diaspora in Serbia. In 2025, thanks to her leadership, Serbia will inaugurate the first major American Resource Center to open in Europe in a decade.

Chelsea Wong

Chelsea Wong is the recipient of the 2024 Robin and Avril Winks Award. A second generation Chinese-New Zealander, she has noticed a limited representation and understanding of Asian New Zealander experiences in the arts and is eager to connect 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 a national Asian Aotearoa Arts strategy as a partnership project between Creative New Zealand, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, and the Ministry for Ethnic Communities.

Emily Zhao

Emily Zhao, a graduate of Duke University, is the recipient of the 2024 Project Support Award Australia for her research in flexible smart home electrification. Emily will spend a year analyzing and collecting data, in collaboration with the University of New South Wales to determine network and household incentives and barriers to implementing flexible demand technologies. This supplemental support from the Lois Roth Foundation will allow Emily to expand the scope of her research to emphasize barriers to entry in flexible energy technology adoption within underserved and low-income communities. Emily will explore incentives to promote flexible energy technologies that align with the economic realities of indigenous and low-income households and complement existing lifestyles. 

According to Emily, this valuable research opportunity, exclusive to Australia due to their leadership in solar energy, can provide invaluable insights to help the U.S in overcoming its own solar adoption challenges.

Samuel Nevins

Samuel Nevins, in collaboration with Universidad de la República, is investigating the social determinants of mental illness in Uruguayan adolescents through participant data collection.  With the help of the 2024 Project Support Award Uruguay, Sam will be able to provide fiscal incentives for participation in his project, increasing the likelihood of a representative sample of data to better inform psychosocial treatment and policy decisions.

Sam is a recent graduate of Brown University. Following this research, he hopes to pursue a PhD in neuropsychology, with a focus on applying scientific findings to public policy.

Dr. Fareed Zakaria

Dr. Fareed Zakaria is the 2024 speaker for the Distinguished Fulbright Lecture. He 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.

Samantha Ruth Brown

Samantha Ruth Brown, a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Oregon, won the 2024 Project Support Award for Denmark. She will use the award to support her dissertation research project on “Fermented Foods, Fresh Perspectives: Prioritizing Inuit Food Sovereignty in a Changing Arctic”. Samantha’s project will explore how Greenlandic Inuit perceive the potential export of iginneq, fermented seal blubber, and other traditional foods in fine dining restaurants. She aims to unravel how the use (or rejection of the use) of iginneq resists, disrupts, or replicates colonial logics. She will collaborate with Greenlandic Inuit scholars and communities to generate an interactive story map of traditional Inuit fermentation practices and write a series of academic and popular media articles focused on traditional Inuit foodways in her exploration of what has made Inuit communities more food insecure than other Indigenous Peoples.

Laura Chang

Laura Chang won the 2024 Project Support Award for Ecuador. She will use the Award to support her project on the Integration of Kichwa and Western Medicines. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Biology with a minor in Latin American Studies and Spanish from Cornell University. Her career goal is to become a medical anthropologist. In Fall 2024, she will undertake a joint MD/PhD program in Anthropology.

Sydney Erlikh

Sydney Erlikh is a PhD candidate in disability studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She will use the 2024 Finland Roth-Thomas Award to support her project on the culture and artistic process of dancers with intellectual disability in collaboration with the University of the Arts’ Theatre Academy and the Kaaos Dance Company in Helsinki. Upon her return to the United States, she will directly apply the pedagogical and performance tools she learn to her dissertation and to the inclusive dance group she co-founded out of Access Living in Chicago.

Leah Balter

Leah Balter won the 2024 Norway Project Support Award. She will use the award to support her case study on Norway’s overlapping Covid-19 pandemic and Ukrainian refugee crisis responses at the University of Bergen. Leah earned her BA in Human Biology from Stanford University with Honors. After completing her Fulbright, she plans to attend medical school and envisions a career as a physician-activist specializing in refugee health.

Cassandra Alvariño

Cassandra Alvariño will use this award to support her research on Sweden’s bid to join NATO in association with the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg as part of her dual Master’s degree in European Studies and Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She plans to pursue a career in diplomacy as a Foreign Service Officer.

Jen Shaneberger

Jen Shaneberger is conducting research for her PhD in International Relations/Comparative Politics with the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. This award will support her research on how political rhetoric impacts migrants’ ability to find and maintain employment in association with Linköping University. She plans to defend her dissertation in November 2024 and submit a chapter for publication in the Journal of International Migration and Integration. Her ultimate career goal is to become a Foreign Service Officer.

Viviana Prado-Núñez

Viviana Prado-Núñez, a graduate of Columbia University, won the 2023 Morocco Project Support Award for her audio series “How to Kill Tigers”, aiming to explore Latino-Moroccan cultural connections and musician migration to Morocco. The Project Support Award will enhance the podcast by funding Spanish translation, marketing, distribution, the creation and recording of Latino-Moroccan-fused theme music.

After Fulbright, she plans to pursue several projects, including the publication of a docufiction bilingual novel about Vieques, Puerto Rico, and the production of her play about Hurricane Maria. She is also considering a graduate degree in theater or Puerto Rican studies. Her ultimate goal is to return to Puerto Rico to live as an artist and perhaps teach at the university level one day.

Sassan Tabatabai

Sassan Tabatabai won the 2023 Persian Translation Prize for his translation of Sadeq Hedayat’s Blind Owl. Tabatabai holds a prominent position as the head of the Persian program at Boston University, where he regularly teaches all levels of Persian language and literature. His multifaceted expertise extends beyond academia, encompassing roles as a poet, translator, editor, and scholar specializing in medieval Persian literature. His work has appeared in a number of publications including Essays in Criticism, The Christian Science Monitor, Literary Imagination, The Republic of Letters, Senecca Review, Leviathan Quarterly and Harvard Review Online. He is the author of Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and his Poetry (Leiden University Press, 2010), Uzunburun: Poems (Pen and Anvil, 2011) and Sufi Haiku (Nemi Books, 2021).

Earl Lewis

Dr. Earl Lewis is the 2023 speaker for the Distinguished Fulbright Lecture. Noted social historian, award-winning author, and educational leader, he is the founding director of the University of Michigan Center for Social Solutions. Also the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of History, Afroamerican and African Studies, and public policy, Lewis is president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2013-18), one of the premier philanthropies supporting the arts, humanities, and higher education. At Michigan, Lewis and colleagues in the center are addressing four core areas of social concern: diversity and race, slavery and its aftermath, water and security, and the dignity of labor in an automated world.

Jody Enders

Jody Enders, Distinguished Professor of French and Theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received the 2022 MLA-Roth Award for her translation of Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries: Yet Another Dozen Medieval French Farces in Modern English. In this collection of twelve French farces, Enders invites the readers to explore the controversial topics of French culture during the time through a blend of hilarity and satire. Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, Enders’s translation has received glowing remarks from the MLA Committee, hailing Enders for her “technical translation prowess, scholarly rigor, and guffaw-inducing creative humor.” Enders not only challenges the modern-day perception of the Middle Ages as a grim period but also harnesses the comedic essence of these stories to encourage readers to reconsider contemporary issues through the lens of historical satire.

Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff received an honorable mention for the 2022 MLA-Roth Translation Award for her translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks, 1914–1916. Perloff introduces to the English-speaking world, and even to the German-speaking sphere where these notebooks aren’t widely accessible in their original form, documents that are indispensable for gaining a clearer understanding of both Wittgenstein’s life story and the genesis of his book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, during the war years. Through her meticulous translation, readers are invited to not only engage with Wittgenstein’s philosophical insights but also to contemplate the sociocultural contexts that influenced his thoughts.

*The Prix Coindreau Prize, The Jeanne Varnay Pleasants Prize for Language Teaching, and the CASVA-Henry & Judith Millon Award are currently inactive.

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