Postcards to Oxford: Hello from the Fulbright Process

June 23, 2010

For the second consecutive year, Eve Mullen, assistant professor of religion at Oxford, has been selected to serve as a peer reviewer for the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) on the national level for the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program, US Studies, administered by the CIES.  

The Fulbright Senior Specialists Program is one of the many opportunities of the Fulbright Program, which is the flagship international educational exchange sponsored by the U.S. government.  The Fulbright's goal is to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.  Participants, who are selected on their academic merit and leadership potential, are given the opportunity to study, teach, conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.

The Fulbright Specialist Program is designed to provide short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) for U.S. faculty and professionals.  The shorter grant lengths give specialists greater flexibility to pursue a grant that works best with their current academic or professional commitments.

Mullen's connection to the Fulbright goes back several years.  In 2001 she was principal investigator on a team of nine scholars and researchers who had received a US Department of State grant for teaching, research, and exchange.  That exchange ultimately resulted in the founding of the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS) graduate program at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.  CRCS is a unique center for the comparative study of religions in majority-Muslim Indonesia.  She returned to CRCS in 2003, teaching world religions in an Islamic context and also working on curriculum building and the acquisition of library resources. 

Mullen's subsequent return trips to CRCS were under the auspices of the Fulbright.  In 2005 she was awarded a Senior Specialist grant and in 2006 a Fulbright Traditional U.S. Scholars grant.  From 2005 to 2009, she was a candidate on the Senior Specialist Roster of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and the CIES.

Said Mullen, "It's an honor and a pleasure to take part in the Senior Specialist Program in this way. I look forward to continued service to Fulbright, a program that has been very generous to me and to CRCS."