In celebration of International Education Week and educational exchanges, we reached out to alumni of our Project Support Award program, and asked them for updates since receiving their award. If you follow us on social media, you may have already had the pleasure of reading some of the updates we received. (And yes, this is a shameless plug to follow us on our socials!)
For those of you who don’t, I’d like to share the updates sent by 6 alumni who benefited from one of our Scandinavian Project Support Awards: Elisa Maria López, Mary Claire Pappas and Theresa Kutasz Christensen each did work on exchange in Sweden; Sarah Holdren and Juniper Hill completed projects in Finland; and Andrew Buckser worked in Denmark. We share their updates below!
Elisa Maria López, Project Support Sweden, 2012:
“After my Fulbright and Roth [Foundation] Fellowship year, I was accepted to the Ph.D. program in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University. I defended my dissertation, Transforming Kiruna: Producing Space, Society, and Legacies of Inequality in the Swedish Ore Fields, in December 2021. Since 2022, I’ve been a postdoctoral researcher in Architectural Theory, History, and Critical Studies at the School of Architecture [at the] KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. My current research project on industrial city transformations for “green transitions” in the Norwegian and Swedish Arctic is funded by the Swedish Research Council and the Lars Erik Lundberg Foundation (2022-25). In Fall 2023, I was also a Guest Researcher at ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, where I conducted research on 20th-century Swedish company towns and worker housing that will assist curators in a new exhibition of the museum collections in 2025.”
Mary Claire Pappas, Project Support Sweden, 2020:
“Since completing my PhD with the help of the Lois Roth [Foundation], I have held museum positions at the Museum of Modern Art [in New York City] and recently begun as a Professor in the Department of Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I have three forthcoming projects that I look forward to sharing: I will publish a chapter of my dissertation in Scandinavian Studies in January; I have recently provided a chapter for the exhibition catalogue [for the] Christian Skredsvig: mot det moderne (Christian Skredsvig: towards modernity) at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Norway; and, finally, I have an edited volume forthcoming in 2025 with Routledge entitled Landscape and Nature in Scandinavian Art.”
Theresa Kutasz Christensen, Project Support Sweden, 2016:
“I recently served as researcher on the curatorial team at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, producing the award winning exhibition and catalogue Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800. The show, which ran from Fall 2023 through Summer 2024, included over 250 objects including stunning loans from the National Museum in Stockholm, made possible by connections made in Sweden while conducting research supported by the Swedish Fulbright Foundation and the Lois Roth Foundation.
Andrew Bucksner, Project Support Denmark, 1990:
“I’ve recently gone back to [the] faculty at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, after spending a number of years [there] as the Dean of Arts and Sciences. The Roth [Foundation] was very helpful in funding my fieldwork back when I was a grad student at UC Berkeley – I spent a year studying religious groups in northwest Jutland, research that formed the basis of my dissertation. A few years later I was back in Denmark, doing research on the Jewish community of Copenhagen [during the Holocaust], some of which appeared in my 2003 book After the Rescue. I’ve also done a good deal of research on the cultural dimensions of Tourette Syndrome, which has been reported in a number of publications. Much of that work was done in the 18 years I was on the faculty at Purdue University. I came to Plattsburgh as dean in 2013 and returned to teaching during the pandemic. These days I’m working on establishing a medical anthropology program at the college, as well as working on some publications about Danish Jews.”
Sarah Holdren, Project Support Finland, 2019:
“[I’m] currently a family medicine resident at St. Joseph Hospital in Denver, CO providing care for patients of all ages. My care is very much informed by the research I completed in family centered care while in Finland.”
Juniper Hill, Project Support Finland, 2004:“I am Professor and Chair of Ethnomusicology at the University of Würzburg [Germany]. I just completed my first documentary film. It’s called Music of our Neighbors about cultural diversity in Germany. I’m happy to arrange free screenings for schools, universities, and cultural organizations!”
We hope you enjoy hearing about these wonderful projects and the endeavors of our alumni as much as we do. We are so gratified by the many ways our alumni continue Lois Roth’s legacy of cultural awareness, hard work and creativity! If you have a connection with one of our alumni or Project Support countries… or if you just believe in educational exchanges and cultural diplomacy, please consider donating to the Roth Foundation today!
