Two Duke Graduate Students Receive Fulbright-Hays Awards

Awards enable doctoral candidates to conduct research abroad

-By OGA Staff

November 28, 2022

The Office of Global Affairs (OGA) is pleased to announce that two Duke graduate students have been awarded the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Award for the 2022-2023 academic year. Joe Hiller, Ph.D. student in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, and Melissa Karp, Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program in Literature, received grants to travel abroad in support of their dissertation projects.

Joe Hiller (left) and Melissa Karp (right), recipients of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award

The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program provides opportunities to doctoral candidates to engage in full-time dissertation research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies. The program is designed to contribute to the development and improvement of the study of modern foreign languages and area studies in the United States. Award funding covers international travel expenses, maintenance allowance, project allowance for research-related expenses, and health and accident insurance premiums for a trip lasting between six and 12 months.

The Fulbright-Hays DDRA Award will allow Joe Hiller to conduct nine months of research in Colombia for his dissertation, titled “Love-Politics and the Prison-Society Nexus: Care Confinement and Carceral Transformation in Colombia.” Joe will collaborate with prison reform organizations and accompany family members of incarcerated individuals on prison visitations in an attempt to understand what imprisonment means for them and what they hope to achieve in terms of carceral reform.

Melissa Karp will conduct research for two months in South Korea and four months in France for her dissertation, titled “Imagining the Collaborator: Ghosts of Occupation in Transwar France and Korea”. Melissa will visit memorials and museums throughout France and Korea to learn about the ways war memory is transmitted in public history spaces.

To learn more about the DDRA application process and requirements, visit OGA’s Fulbright webpage or contact Hal Matthews (hal.matthews@duke.edu).