June 18, 2001

Contact: Anne Merydith-Wolf or Hodgie Bricke, International Programs, (785) 864-6161.

Four more KU students receive Fulbrights

LAWRENCE -- Four University of Kansas graduate students have won prestigious Fulbright awards for study and research abroad in the 2001-02 academic year, KU's Office of International Programs has announced.

The winners are Christiansen Soren Larsen, geography doctoral student from Lexington, Ill.; Max Maximov, May 2001 master's degree graduate in German literature from Germany; Ratna Radhakrishna, geography doctoral student, and Mark Richard Munzinger, history doctoral student, both from Lawrence. In May, KU announced that two graduating seniors had won Fulbright grants for 2001-02.

Editors note: Click here to see previous award announcement.

International Programs coordinates the applications for Fulbright and other graduate fellowships for study and research abroad. Since the Fulbright program's beginnings in 1947, 363 KU students have received Fulbrights, including the six award winners for the 2001-02 academic year.

Funded in large part by the U.S. Congress, but also by many participating countries as well as private corporations, a Fulbright grant covers roundtrip travel, health insurance, tuition, if relevant, and living expenses for an academic year. More than 140 countries participate in the bilateral exchange program.

Three of the graduate students received their grants under the auspices of the Fulbright U.S. Graduate Student Program administered on behalf of the U.S. State Department by the Institute of International Education in New York City.

Larsen received a Fulbright grant to conduct an ethnographic study of the sense of place in the Lakes District of British Columbia. The project combines humanistic inquiry with the rigorous quantitative methods of a social scientist and will be Larsen's dissertation topic.

Maximov received a Fulbright grant to Germany. Born in the Soviet Union, Maximov completed his primary and secondary education there before moving to western Kansas to earn an undergraduate degree at Fort Hays State University. While at Heinrich-Heine UniversitŠt, Dusseldorf, he will research the representation of Russia and Russians in the literature of the German Middle Ages.

Radhakrishna received a Fulbright for her research on the gendered use of natural resources among the indigenous Miskitu people of Honduras. Radhakrishna will conduct her study in Ahuas, a typical inland Miskitu village located along the Patuca River in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve.

Munzinger received a U.S. Department of State Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship for six months of dissertation research in Cracow, Poland. Munzinger will examine the judicial activity of the High Court of Magdeburg Law at the Fortress of Cracow from the 14th to the 16th centuries. This study will contribute to a broader understanding of the relationship between law and society during the late medieval period. Munzinger has already received several other awards supporting his work, including three Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships from KU's Center for Russian and East European Studies.