Fulbright Scholars

Bringing the World to South Bend and Vice Versa

For the academic year 1965-66, IU South Bend economics professor Joseph Martellaro taught at the University of Cordoba in Argentina. The opportunity was the result of a Fulbright scholarship. Martellaro was the first IU South Bend professor to receive the honor, and the university has seen 11 more Fulbright Scholars emerge People sitting around a table from its ranks in the ensuing years. Most recently, English professor Elaine Roth secured a Fulbright that sent her to Mexico City in the Spring of 2023. Roth has the additional distinction of being the only faculty member to earn the honor twice.

The origin of the Fulbright Program goes back to 1946. Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright had seen the horrors of World War II finally come to an end and dreaded the thought of what a third world war would look like in the nuclear age. He sensed the urgent need to promote understanding and civility among nations, and a lively international exchange of knowledgeable experts was an eminently reasonable proposal.

Fulbright scholarships lead to a deep immersion in another culture

The senator’s vision set in motion the phenomenal exchange of ideas and experiences that IU South Bend’s Fulbright honorees have lived out in countries all over the world, and the Fulbrighters who are still currently on the faculty can attest Conference to this.

Anthropologist Rebecca Torstrick spent the 2003-04 school year on a lecturing and research Fulbright in Israel. She taught the first semester at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva and spent the second semester on a research project called “Visioning the Future in Times of Conflict” in the city of Acre.

At the university, Torstrick taught Israeli and American students in an international master’s program. Her course, titled “The Public Sphere in the Middle East,” explored debates about civil society, citizenship, and human rights. In Acre, Torstrick applied an anthropological technique called Ethnographic Futures, which is an interview-based approach.

“I was asking people to tell me, going about 10 years out, what would be the worst possible future for them and what would a future look like if it were really good,” Torstrick said.

Because her interview subjects were both Jewish and Palestinian, she gathered a wide range of responses, but common themes emerged.

“There was a lot of political violence going on, but people kept saying that they could imagine a future where there would be peace,” she said.

Torstrick brought her 10-year-old daughter Maia with her for the full trip and seeing things like the huge separation fence near Jerusalem made a deep impression on them both. A recurring theme for Torstrick was imagining what people back home would think of such living conditions. She regularly questioned what residents would do if South Bend had a wall through it, limiting basic services to only preferred members of society.

It wasn’t just that year in Israel, my Fulbright experience lasted about a good nine years.
- Rebecca Torstrick

The frustrating implied conclusion of the Ethnographic Futures questioning was that coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians was a shared goal among individual citizens, but a broader societal refusal was perpetually rendering actual peaceful coexistence impossible.

“It wasn’t just that year in Israel,” Torstrick said, “my Fulbright experience lasted about a good nine years.”

People standing in front of water Joseph Chaney’s involvement with Fulbright has also extended beyond his initial stint, as he continues to serve as Fulbright’s official IU South Bend representative. In 2009-10, Chaney, an English professor, worked at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, but he was not just there to teach a class.

“I was an unusual case, because my role was to be an administrator,” Chaney said. “At that time in Hong Kong, they were about to launch a new way of configuring their university degrees. They were moving from a British model to an American model. Previously, when students entered a program, all they would take was within that program, so someone studying English would never take a science course, just English. With the new General Education method, students in their early semesters would begin to take courses outside of their discipline.”

The class he taught overlapped solidly with his administrative function. It was a humanities seminar titled “In Dialogue with Humanity,” and the setting – an open-ended discussion forum – was new to most of his pupils.

“The students were used to memorizing things and then spilling the knowledge back out,” Chaney said. “The Gen Ed focus was to get them to think more independently and to speak from their own perspective.”

When Elaine Roth arrived at the Complutense University of Madrid to begin her first Fulbright in 2010-11, she found a similar classroom dynamic as Chaney experienced in Hong Kong.

“The European style of pedagogy is very different from the U.S.,” Roth said. “In Europe, it’s mostly lecturing. Students don’t typically have small assignments like quizzes, short papers, presentations. There’s only a big test at the end of the semester.”

She respected what they were accustomed to, but also incorporated some American-style class discussions. Roth taught a large survey class for undergraduates and another, smaller course for graduate students. Both were on the topic of American literature and cinema. She kept some of the curriculum she uses for similar classes in America but tailored some of the content specifically for her Spanish pupils.

At the Ibero-American University in Mexico City this spring, Roth is teaching a survey course on the history of African-American film directors.

The myriad complexities of life as a Fulbright Scholar are illustrated eloquently in the blog that Monica Tetzlaff wrote during her 2014-15 experiences in Ghana. The blog is called “Ghana Mama,” because Tetzlaff had her daughter Hannah and husband Brad with her, and their family adventures bring a happy balance to some of the more grim aspects of Tetzlaff’s assignment. Her research focused on the ongoing efforts in Ghana to improve the conditions that have befallen people (mostly women) who have been accused of witchcraft. Tetzlaff was based at the University of Ghana in Legon, a suburb of the city of Accra.

The myriad complexities of life as a Fulbright Scholar are illustrated eloquently in Monica Tetzlaff's blog.

Especially in the rural parts of Ghana, there are still superstitions and misunderstandings that lead to women being accused of witchcraft and banished to “witch camps.” The women affected by this are mostly powerless and marginalized, so their case has been taken up by human rights campaigns within Ghana and from outside the country. Her colleague, Kwadwo Okrah, was born in Ghana and was already there conducting his own research, and the two of them collaborated throughout Tetzlaff’s Fulbright semesters.

For the first semester, Tetzlaff team-taught six courses at the university. The second semester was largely spent in rural regions. City life in Accra was a far more urban experience than South Bend is, but the remote countryside was much the opposite.

Hannah was five years old at the time, and she was enrolled at the German Swiss International School in Accra, studying alongside children from all over the world. The blog posts are regularly enlivened by Hannah’s activities such as learning Ghanaian children’s games and teaching the other kids how to play duck-duck-goose.

People working in front of a desk In a May 2015 wrap-up lecture, Tetzlaff compared civil rights activism in the United States with similar efforts in Ghana, emphasizing that positive change comes about through a combination of grass-roots movements and meaningful legislation. It all ties in with Senator Fulbright’s original vision of the scholars being essentially peace ambassadors.

“I think it is about peace, and the more we understand each other – our commonalities as well as our differences – it reduces the fear,” Tetzlaff said. “Having these kinds of relationships leads to less fear and therefore less tendency towards war.”

Fulbright scholarships lead to a deep immersion in another culture, something Tetzlaff emphasizes as a crucial dimension to the program’s power.

“You can’t learn to really understand a culture on just a little research trip,” she said.

History professor Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker went to Poland for her 2020-21 research Fulbright. She did not have teaching responsibilities and focused instead on studying the burgeoning women’s movement in Germany and Poland in the 19th century, specifically in the city of Wroclaw (called Breslau in German.) The project was titled, “Breaking Through Barriers: Breslau’s Jewish Women Leaders.”

Zwicker identified a microcosm of the women’s movement in the case of a Jewish woman named Lina Bauer Morgenstern and her four sisters. They were able to overcome societally embedded sexism and antisemitism and rose to positions of prominence.

Zwicker is currently writing a book about the Bauers, called Lina and Her Sisters, the Bauers from Breslau: Jewish Women Navigating Love, Marriage, and the Women’s Movement in the Long Nineteenth Century.

In addition to her main topic of focus, Zwicker still had South Bend in her thoughts. After visiting the city of Lodz, Zwicker pointed out in her blog some of the similarities between Lodz and South Bend, both of which have a rich industrial history and a subsequent decline. Zwicker pondered what South Bend might emulate about the way Lodz has reinvented some of its public spaces.

“I tried to use those blog posts as ways to think about comparisons with the United States,” she said.

In Lodz, Zwicker admired the Manufaktura, a stylish shopping mall and arts center which is the product of a creative reimagining of former factory space. Seeing what an impact could be reaped from a combination of public and private investment in such a project, she wrote that “...South Bend’s Studebaker buildings are just waiting.”

She saw similar successes in Wroclaw, and she wished that Americans could embrace more of a willingness to invest in public spaces. Zwicker was also struck by the proliferation of paintings, sculptures, and murals that enliven the university’s visual aesthetic.

“These valuable artworks are in public spaces, even though that means that they could potentially be stolen or vandalized,” Zwicker said.

Zwicker’s thought process is a fitting example of how the Fulbright program is a win-win proposition. IU South Bend’s scholars bring their expertise to a host school and then come back to South Bend with newly acquired skills in empirical research that can be helpful here at the home campus. They have left their mark on the curriculum of a university far away and they employ what they’ve learned abroad in ways that improve the curriculum at home.

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Fulbright Scholars