Awardee Database

Awardees

Mathias Tientcheu

Mathias Tientcheu, Public Engagement Specialist at Embassy Yaoundé, has for over two decades been a cornerstone of U.S. public diplomacy in Cameroon, exemplifying creativity, cultural fluency, mentorship, and lasting impact. As an Established Opinion Leaders Specialist, he has led IVLP, Fulbright, university partnerships, and cultural programs including AFCP, while transforming American Corners in Buea and Garoua to extend U.S. outreach into Cameroon’s English-speaking Southwest and Muslim-majority North. From serving as official interpreter at the 2005 New Embassy Compound inauguration to spearheading Cameroon’s Cultural Property Agreement with the U.S., Mathias combines exceptional diplomacy, vision, and innovation. As his nominator notes, his programming, mentorship, and unwavering dedication have left an indelible mark on colleagues, communities, and institutions.

Serafina Kennedy

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.

Yassin Adnan & Alexander Elinson

For the 2025 Arabic Literature Tour, Moroccan author Yassin Adnan and US translator Alexander Elinson present the novel Hot Maroc, longlisted for the IPAF in 2017 and published in translation by Syracuse University Press in 2021. Darkly comedic, Hot Maroc is told through the eyes of the hapless Rahhal Laâouina, aka the Squirrel. Painfully shy, not that bright, and not all that popular, Rahhal somehow imagines himself a hero. With a useless degree in ancient Arabic poetry, he finds his calling in the online world, where he discovers email, YouTube, Facebook, and the news site Hot Maroc. The novel gives a vital portrait of the challenges faced by today’s Moroccans in a repressive society, where adherence to traditional cultural icons both anchors and stifles creative production.

Yassin Adnan —poet, fiction writer, editor and TV presenter— is the author of 6 poetry collections, 3 short-story collections, a novel and a book about travel. He serves as president of the Marrakech English Book Festival and is the founder of two literary magazines. The host of cultural TV programs, a radio show and a podcast, he has also edited various titles, including the anthology Marrakech Noir (2018), and participated in a range of international programs, including in the U.S.

Alexander Elinson teaches Arabic Language & Literature at Hunter College/CUNY and directs their Summer Arabic Program. His research interests include Arabic and Hebrew literature from the pre-Islamic to the modern period. His current book project, Looking Back: The Poetics of Loss and Nostalgia in Muslim Spain, examines the intersection between literary convention and poetic subjectivity; his current research and translation projects include looking at Moroccan prison writing.

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.”

Derek Russell

Derek graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree in Architecture, and is undertaking architectural design research in Ecuador. His 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 by the Lois Roth Foundation 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. 

Through his research, Derek hopes to gain ancestral and community knowledge on sustainable building for disaster mitigation, integrating some of this knowledge into sustainable architectural design. 

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 with the goal of evaluating 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 program at Texas Tech University and advocate to  local governmental representatives for policies mitigating burnout.

Marielle Buxbaum

Marielle Buxbaum’s Theatre for Youth Futures: Engaging Ecuadorian Urban Teens explores the social concerns of Ecuadorian youth. Marielle’s playwriting-for-social-change program looks to address difficult experiences of youth from Loja, including bullying, suicide, intra-family violence and drug abuse through plays written and performed by participating teens. Her 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. Purchased items, kept by the high school arts teachers, would allow those teachers freedom to continue the project for years to come.

Marielle plans to work with local artists to ensure that the new playwriting program lives on after her return to the U.S., and also hopes to publish her research, providing insights into how various local art forms foster youth storytelling when integrated into theatrical writing.

Paul Reitter

In its 18th edition, the MLA-Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work went to Paul Reitter (Ohio State) for his translation of of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy (Princeton UP, 2024). The first new English translation in fifty years and the only one based on the last German edition, revised by Marx himself—it captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx’s thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original. This critical edition features extensive original commentary and a foreword by acclaimed political theorist Wendy Brown.

Dr. Bart Pushaw

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.

Alex Gil

Alex Gil (Yale) received an honorable mention for his translation of Aimé Césaire’s lost drama on the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture, written during WWII, under the watchful eye of Vichy censors in Martinique. Now available for the first time in English, . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent / . . . . . . Et les chiens se taisaient (Duke UP, 2024) is a bilingual edition of this meditation on Black revolution and liberatory violence, rife with Césaire’s entrancing poetry and theatrical verve.

Inass Esshrir

Moroccan doctoral student Inass Esshrir was awarded the first grant of the Roth pilot project- Inbound Support grant. 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.

Fiona Graham

An honorable mention was awarded to Fiona Graham for her translation of The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi (UMN Pr., 2024). In a remarkable blend of historical reportage, memoir, and lyrical reimagining, Sámi journalist Elin Anna Labba travels to the lost—and still abandoned—homeland to tell of the forced removal of her nomadic ancestors, and how it both lives on in the hearts of Sámi today and echoes indigenous histories around the world. The book won Sweden’s prestigious August Prize for Best Nonfiction in 2020.

Johnny O. Hishmeh

The 2025 Lois Roth Award for excellence in cultural diplomacy goes to Johnny O. Hishmeh, Public Diplomacy Officer for Public Engagement in the Venezuela Affairs Unit at the U. S. Embassy in Bogota.

Johnny exemplifies the legacy of Lois Roth through his patience, wisdom, and generosity in supporting his team in Caracas. Under challenging conditions from Bogota, Johnny has mentored his team and university partners in Venezuela , guiding them through project management, leadership, and financial oversight. His innovative educational diplomacy initiatives have resulted in 26 new U.S.-Venezuelan university partnerships. Notably, he and his team created a U.S.-style internship program with VenAmCham, offering industry tours and applied learning for 60 students from two top universities, an initiative that has laid the groundwork for future programs.

M.R. Ghanoonparvar

For 2025, the first prize goes to M.R. Ghanoonparvar (UT Austin) for his translation of Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s two-volume novel The House of the Edrisis (1991-2) (Syracuse UP).

The House of Edrisis plays on historical parallels of the Islamic Revolution in Iran within its setting of 1910s Soviet Turkmenistan. Following the drama and dissolution of the powerful Edrisis family, the novel’s dark comedic style lends itself to such complex themes of revolution, hierarchy and social change.

M.R. Ghanoonparvar is professor emeritus of Persian and comparative literature at the University of Texas, Austin. He has translated over 30 books between Persian and English, including The Patient Stone by Sadeq Chubak and Savushun by Simin Daneshvar. In addition to translation, he is a widely-published author on Persian culture, often co-authoring works alongside his wife, Diane Wilcox.

Nicole Finnemann

Honorable Mention for the 2025 Lois Roth Award goes to Nicole (Nikki) Finnemann, Public Affairs Officer at the Consulate General in Barcelona.

Nikki has consistently demonstrated superior creativity, profound cultural sensitivity, and remarkable human warmth in fostering meaningful international collaboration. She led the 2025 Academy for Women Entrepreneurs Continental Summit, connecting women entrepreneurs across Europe with AI-enhanced business tools, and launched JumpStartUp, linking Barcelona’s biotech community with counterparts in Boston to foster scientific and cultural exchange. Previously, she spearheaded the Department’s public diplomacy engagement at the Ninth Summit of the Americas, highlighting cultural voices, and pioneered the Department’s first modern diaspora cultural engagement strategy, positioning Latin American communities as vital cultural bridges in shaping summit priorities.

Abeeda Shahid Talukder and Aria Fani

The second 2025 MLA-Roth Translation Prize goes to The Shape of Extinction (Asemana Books), a collection of Bijan Jalali’s minimalist poems by poet Abeeda Shahid Talukder and Aria Fani (UWash), which masterfully conveys Jalali’s meditative style.

Poet and author of Ghazal Cosmopolitan provides a brilliant reflection of the collection and the translators’ work: “where Fani’s insights contextualize the unique place Jalali has in the ‘overlapping and plural modernisms’ of Persian poetry— one of the world’s richest poetic traditions— Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s fine touch as a co-translator pierces the exosphere of craft, reaching the sphere of the elusive beloved, a space she knows well as a poet who draws from the Urdu tradition. The translated poems in Shape of Extinction settle as dew, refracting the mighty, delicate tendrils between the past and the yet to come, in Jalali’s Persian, a rare gift”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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