HIGHLIGHTING UD'S INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
Volume 3, Number 1
Happy 90th to a UD innovation! Join us in celebrating a University of Delaware innovation, as we look back at America's first study abroad program and share stories of its ongoing legacy.
Volume 2, Number 1
How many countries have you visited? In this issue, expand your horizons with Ralph Begleiter, director of UD's Center for Political Communication (and former CNN world affairs correspondent) who recently reached the travel century mark.
Volume 1, Number 1
Our premier issue celebrates the opening of the Confucius Institute at UD, our continuing role in the Middle East Partnership Initiative and our world-class program for Olympic coaches. Welcome, world, to UD Global!
The University of Delaware Chorale won four awards at the 42nd International Tolosa Choral Contest in Spain, placing in every category in which it competed.
Appearances in the contest are by invitation only, and UD was one of only two U.S. choirs that participated, along with 20 other groups from Europe, Japan, the Philippines, Ukraine and Russia. UD's chorale was invited because of its 2007 first-place award at the 10th International Choir Festival in Talinn, Estonia.
The 48 chorale members had an "amazing trip," according to director Paul Head, with standing ovations at every performance. They also won the distinctly European accolade of synchronized clapping‚ – "an honor offered only to the best of the best," Head noted.
The University of Delaware is among the nation's top producers of Fulbright scholars, with the following faculty receiving awards for 2010–2011. Administered by the U.S. Department of State, the international exchange program is designed to "increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries."
Gonzalo Arce, Charles Black Evans Professor of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, is the first recipient of the Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair
in Information and Communications Technologies, funded by the Nokia Foundation
and the Finnish Fulbright Commission. He is working with Helsinki University of Technology and Nokia Research Center on compressive sensing. This
technology recovers signals and images from far fewer data than traditional
methods and has potential impacts in medical imaging to consumer electronics.
Stuart Kauffman, professor of political science and international relations, will be the Fulbright-Diplomatic Academy visiting professor of international
relations at the Diplomatic Academy at the University of Vienna during spring 2011. Drawing on his experience serving on the U.S. National Security Council staff, he will
teach a graduate seminar on American foreign policy and a course on ethnic conflict based on his two decades of study of ethnic conflicts around the globe. He also will
give public lectures in Europe on American grand strategy and on options for resolving ethnic conflicts.
Ajay Manrai, professor of marketing and faculty director of graduate and
executive programs in the Lerner College of Business and Economics, won a
Fulbright-Nehru Research Scholar Award for research in India in spring 2011.
Hosted by the Indian Institute of Management in Hyderabad and the Anand Group
of Companies in New Delhi, he will conduct research on the similarities and
differences in the marketing strategies of Indian companies, and multinational
companies with origins in both the U.S. and abroad.
Beth Morling, associate professor of psychology, is researching social support
on her Fulbright at Kyoto University in Japan. She and Yukiko Uchida of the
Kokoro Research Center are studying a phenomenon observed by other scholars,
that in East Asian cultural contexts, people are more reluctant to ask friends
or family for help when under stress because they don’t want to burden others with the obligation. However, in European-American
contexts, people tend to feel more comfortable, perhaps because they think
others are free to help or not, by individual choice.
Jean Pfaelzer, professor of English with appointments in the Women’s Studies and East Asian programs, has been awarded a Senior Fulbright in
Holland for spring 2011. Hosted by the American studies program at the
University of Utrecht, she will teach seminars on Asian American culture and
19th-century women authors. She also will use Dutch archives, from diaries to
court and maritime records, to complete her research on Muted
Mutinies, a study
of slave rebellions on ships transporting kidnapped “coolies” from China to work on Caribbean sugar plantations.
Susan Strasser, Richards Professor of History, won a Fulbright appointment as a senior lecturer in history at the Free University of Berlin for spring 2011. She will join the Free University’s John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, where she will teach graduate and undergraduate courses in American consumer culture and in global and American environmental history, her specialties. She will also deliver talks to academic and public audiences on subjects drawn from her new book project, A Historical Herbal: Household Medicine in a Developing Consumer Culture.
Matthew T. Watters, a University of Delaware senior from Ramsey, N.J., is one of 32 American men and women selected as 2010 Rhodes Scholars representing the United States.
A neuroscience major and political science minor at UD, Watters will begin his studies at the University of Oxford in England in October 2011. He plans to work toward a master of science degree in global health science.
Watters founded Students for Haiti, which is raising funds to rebuild a hospital destroyed in the town of Villa. He also has worked in two hospitals in south Sudan, training staff in the prevention of infection.
"His work greatly improved the level of care in those hospitals," says Katharine C. Kerrane, senior associate director of the UD Honors Program. "He has a fearless quality when it comes to tackling problems."
James F. Weiher, an instructor at UD's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Wilmington, received the Federal Republic of Germany Friendship Award from Honorary Consul Barbara Afanassiev on Oct. 1, 2010. Given by the German ambassador, Klaus Scharioth, the award recognizes outstanding Americans who in their respective fields of academia, politics, media, culture and other areas, have had an impact in fostering positive German-American relations.
The University of Delaware ranks third in the U.S. among public, doctorate-granting research institutions in student participation in study abroad, according to the 2010 Open Doors report by the Institute of International Education (IIE). The rankings are based on the 2008–2009 academic year.
UD had a study-abroad participation rate of 39 percent, behind only Miami University (Ohio), at 42.9 percent, and the College of William and Mary, at 40.3 percent.
Additionally, UD ranks seventh among the top-20 leading doctoral research institutions in the number of students who participate in short-term study-abroad programs, from two to four weeks long.
UD also is the leading destination in Delaware for international students. Of the 3,005 foreign students studying in Delaware in 2009–2010, UD welcomed the highest number: 2,491.
International students spent an estimated $76.4 million in Delaware in 2009–2010. The majority of Delaware's international students are from China, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
