Headlines
Three KU students earn Fulbright Awards
LAWRENCE — This year’s Fulbright U.S. Student grantees include recent graduates from the School of Music who will study and conduct research in Spain and the Czech Republic, and a recent graduate from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences who was selected to teach English in Colombia.
New book deconstructs North Africa
LAWRENCE — By tracing the roots and shifting definitions of the area known as the Maghreb, native son Majid Hannoum aims to liberate study of the region from its colonial past. The University of Kansas associate professor of anthropology has just published a book addressing the history and identity of this part of northern Africa
Full stories below.
————————————————————————
Contact: Christine Metz Howard, [email protected]
Three KU students earn Fulbright Awards
LAWRENCE – Three University of Kansas students received prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Awards to study, conduct research and teach English abroad for the 2021-2022 academic year. Five additional KU students were named as alternate Fulbright recipients.
This year’s Fulbright U.S. Student grantees include recent graduates from the School of Music who will study and conduct research in Spain and the Czech Republic, and a recent graduate from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences who was selected to teach English in Colombia.
“As the Fulbright program reemerges from the pandemic, I could not be more delighted to see KU students leading the way,” said Charles Bankart, associate vice provost for International Affairs. “This past year has brought unprecedented challenges to mobility, resulting in the complete suspension of critical programs like Fulbright. At the same time, the pandemic has underscored the global nature of the problems our society faces and how critical international collaboration and global networking are to knowledge, discovery, innovation and advancement.”
The Fulbright program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between Americans and people of other countries. The U.S. Student Fulbright program operates in more than 160 countries worldwide.
Fulbright grant recipients are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, record of service and demonstrated leadership in their respective fields. Fulbright grants provide funding for round-trip travel, maintenance for one academic year, health and accident insurance, and, where relevant, tuition.
Since the program’s inception in 1946, KU has had 484 students, including this year’s recipients, selected for Fulbright awards. KU International Affairs coordinates the applications for Fulbright grants.
“This was the largest applicant group KU has had during my time as the university’s Fulbright Program adviser,” said Rachel Sherman Johnson, director of internationalization and partnerships at KU International Affairs. “These students rose to the challenge of applying for the program during a worldwide crisis, their enthusiasm for and belief in the value of international engagement undiminished by the pandemic. To be selected for a Fulbright award is always an outstanding achievement, but even more so in our current global moment.”
The 2021-2022 Fulbright recipients:
Samuel Buse, La Mesa, California, is a 2021 graduate with a master’s degree in church music and organ performance. Buse will study at the Instituto del Órgano Hispano in Seville, Spain, with Andrés Cea Galán, a prominent performer, teacher and scholar of the historic Spanish organ. Buse will have access to historically significant organs throughout southern Spain, primary source documents and the guidance of an expert in private instruction. These experiences will build upon the musical and academic research that Buse has already begun and inspire a work of original scholarship.
Gabrielle Doue, Omaha, Nebraska, is a 2019 KU graduate with bachelor’s degrees in English and Spanish and is a graduate student in linguistics and language pedagogy at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She was selected for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship for Colombia. Doue also was selected in 2020-21, deferred and re-applied for the award in the 2021-2022 cycle.
Isabel Keleti, Leawood, graduated from KU in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in piano performance and from The New School in 2019 with a master’s degree in piano performance. She will spend nine months in the Czech Republic studying Czech piano repertoire with an emphasis on the works of Leoš Janácek. Keleti will study at the Janácek Academy of Music and Performing Arts under the guidance of Professor Jan Jiraský, a leading scholar of Janácek. The opportunity will provide a deeper understanding of how Czech composers combine elements of mainstream classical music with those that are distinctly Czech. Upon her return, Keleti will share Czech repertoire through performance, research and teaching.
Alternates
Sadie Arft, Menasha, Wisconsin, is a doctoral candidate in the history of art. She proposed a project in Belgium to explore the production, patronage and cultural significance of game park tapestries created in the Flemish weaving centers of Enghien, Brussels and Oudenaarde during the second half of the 16th century. The research contributes to a broader understanding of the importance of tapestries, an understudied medium, to the visual culture of early modern Europe.
Natasha LaGrega, Leawood, is a 2021graduate with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology. She proposed to travel to Spain to discover factors that contribute to developing mild cognitive impairment. The research would have been with the Vallecas Project in South Madrid, which through a longitudinal study of community participants aims to identify markers in healthy individuals that predict potential neurodegeneration leading to Alzheimer’s disease.
Matthew Santoyo, Ventura, California, is a 2021 graduate with bachelor’s degrees in aerospace engineering and German studies. He is an alternative for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship for Germany.
Jacob Springer, Salina, is a 2020 graduate with bachelor’s degrees in history and Slavic and Eurasian languages & literatures with a Russian emphasis. He is an alternate for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship for Belarus.
Sneha Verma, Wichita, is a 2021 graduate with bachelor’s degrees in economics and mathematics. She proposed research in Malaysia to evaluate the effectiveness of Malaysia’s Economic Transformation Programme in Kuala Lumpur. The program attempts to grow and revolutionize Malaysia into a high-income economy, and the research focuses on two specific policies: increased technological integration for a more efficient high-speed transit system and increased green space per person.
————————————————————————
Don’t miss new episodes of “When Experts Attack!,”
a KU News Service podcast hosted by Kansas Public Radio.
https://kansaspublicradio.org/when-experts-attack
————————————————————————
Contact: Rick Hellman, 785-864-8852, [email protected]
New book deconstructs North Africa
LAWRENCE – By tracing the roots and shifting definitions of the area known as the Maghreb, native son Majid Hannoum aims to liberate study of the region from its colonial past.
The University of Kansas associate professor of anthropology has just published a book addressing the history and identity of this part of northern Africa, “The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East” (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
The name Maghreb (which in Arabic means “west”) as used for the region of North Africa (without Egypt) is an ambiguous term, little known among the U.S. public and little used in the region itself, where people instead identify with the nation-state: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia. Yet the term is commonly used in France, with a clear meaning. Hannoum argues that French colonials invented the region and, by the same token, created an immense field of study around it.
“A lot of young scholars are very interested in the field,” Hannoum said. “But, at the same time, the field needs to be liberated from its colonial past. That’s why I wrote this book — to help do that.”
While the region is demarcated by Egypt to the east, itself part of the Middle East (also a colonial construction, though of the British), the Mediterranean (a 19th century construct) delimits its northwest, as a frontier of Europe, and the vast Sahara Desert to the south marks its division from the rest of the African continent. Hannoum argues that colonials invented other new markers as well: racial, linguistic, religious, but also geographical according to newly drawn colonial boundaries, especially between the French and the British empires.
Hannoum said that colonial invention of the region of northern Africa also involved the invention of Africa as a Black continent and the Middle East as an Arab bloc. The book also endeavors to help scholars of Africa and the Middle East understand how these regions were constructed and defined in relation to and against the region called the Maghreb, which is neither African nor Middle Eastern. These constructions still constitute our present.
“Maghrebi has become an ethnicity in France,” Hannoum said. “But as a Moroccan child, you were not aware of it. It makes sense only amongst the Francophone elite, and generally those who interiorized French culture.”
Apart from, yet related to, France’s military might, Hannoum wrote of what he called the “technologies of power” that enabled and reinforced the French colonial period, beginning in 1830 and continuing through the African independence movements of the 20th century. He said that these strategies — enforced through colonial-informed disciplines like archaeology, anthropology, history, linguistics, cartography and even tourist industries — were so all-encompassing that nationalist scholars of the region were forced to respond to them, in some cases even internalizing and repeating the colonial framing of issues.
“In the final analysis, the Maghreb was constituted by the colonial discourse, a discourse regulated by tremendous amounts of power,” Hannoum said. “It’s also backed by strong institutions, including schools, presses, government agencies … So this discourse has a lot of power at its command. You cannot ignore it. You cannot not use its categories. And when you do that, you automatically reproduce its ‘truths,’ even when you contest it. You submit to its discursive power, so to speak.”
Hannoum said that when he moved from French- to English-speaking academia many years ago, he gained a new perspective on how the Maghreb is viewed by people outside the Francophone zone.
Hannoum is also affiliated with KU’s Center for Global & International Studies, its African Studies Center and the Department of African & African-American Studies. He is also the author of the recent book “Living Tangier: Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
Hannoum cited a variety of French and Arabic sources in “The Invention of the Maghreb,” from the 14th century Muslim philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun and 16th century historian and diplomat Leo Africanus, to Elisée Reclus, Vidal de La Blache, Fernand Braudel and Abdallah Laroui, striving always to explain why they should be considered authoritative.
“The region itself is not a natural entity — the region is a conception, a reconfiguration, a colonial invention,” Hannoum said. “When we say ‘colonial,’ it means it was born in a certain time, with a certain type of politics, with a number of preconceived ideas and also a number of prejudices …
“That is why today you still have some people who argue that colonialism was good for the region because it has brought modernity. This is a very colonial idea. You’ll find that in France, and I am afraid you also find it among some scholars in the United States. So I hope the book will generate discussion or debate around the creation of the region, but also around the way we write about the region today.
“The book is not designed only for scholars who work on the Maghreb. Africanists as well as scholars of the Middle East may be very interested in seeing how Africa and the Middle East were also invented in relation to the region of the Maghreb, despite the fact that the Maghreb remains geographically African and culturally Middle Eastern.”
————————————————————————
KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
[email protected]
http://www.news.ku.edu
Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]
Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs
