KU News Release

LAWRENCE — A third University of Kansas graduate student has received a prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research fellowship for research in Uganda.

Ryan Gibb, doctoral student in political science from Omaha, Neb., will be investigating land tenure laws in Uganda as a Fulbright-Hays Fellow next spring. The fellowship program is administered by the International Education Programs Service of the U.S. Department of Education. KU’s International Programs office coordinates the program on campus.

Gibb is the third KU doctoral student to receive a Fulbright-Hays dissertation research fellowship for the 2009-10 academic year. In June, KU’s International Programs office announced that Sidney Eric Dement, an Overland Park doctoral student in Slavic languages and literatures, and Hilary Brooke Hungerford, Highlands Ranch, Colo., had also received fellowships. Dement will be conducting research in Russia and Hungerford in Niger.

Since the Fulbright program’s inception in 1946, 413 KU students, including Gibb, have received grants or fellowships through the Fulbright and the Fulbright-Hays programs.

Gibb focuses on comparative politics and international studies at KU with a Foreign Language Area Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. He will begin his research in Uganda in May. Gibb began working on his doctorate at KU as a graduate teaching assistant in political science after teaching American history in a Ugandan school for boys ages 13 to 19.

While in Uganda, Gibb met farmers and learned not only of competition for fertile land for urban uses but also of complicated land ownership disputes. Uganda is reforming land ownership laws that have been determined by a complex mix of ethnic or cultural, national and parliamentary laws. Gibb proposed to research the political and economic shifts in Uganda that have created new land tenure laws for his dissertation. Hannah Britton, KU associate professor in political science, is his dissertation adviser.

“Most of the farming is subsistence compared to here and often farmers do not own the land they farm,” Gibb said, noting that his maternal grandfather had been a sharecrop farmer in Nebraska. He is the son of Dick and Linda Gibb of Omaha. He has two degrees in international affairs from Marquette University in Milwaukee, a bachelor’s from 2004 and master’s from 2005.

For more than a half century, the U.S. Student Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation programs, both sponsored by the U.S. government, have offered highly qualified graduate students an unparalleled opportunity to study, conduct research or teach in other nations. While both serve international education and national security interests, Fulbright-Hays programs are distinct from the Fulbright programs administered by the U.S. Department of State, which focus on an exchange of scholars. Fulbright-Hays programs focus on strengthening area and foreign language expertise among current and prospective U.S. educators. Both provide funding for round-trip travel, maintenance for one academic year, health and accident insurance and, when relevant, tuition.

For more information, visit the Fulbright-Hays Web site.