ABSTRACT
Fulbright awards have long proven effective in influencing the way individual faculty members perceive their subjects and teach. Since international travel can be crucial to internationalizing almost any curriculum, and since Fulbright awards finance a scholar’s extended travel to a different country, thereby broadening that scholar’s perspective and adding tools to their teaching arsenal, they have over the decades profoundly affected thousands of individual academics. After briefly summarizing the history of the Fulbright program and surveying the types of awards available, this chapter describes two Fulbright awards I myself have received under two different programs and (to show the variety of possible Fulbright experiences) offers case studies of other communication scholars who have received Fulbright awards. The details of these various case studies reveal many possibilities as well as the overall shape of the program. Other countries also fund faculty exchanges, and a few of the major programs are mentioned. Fulbright awards have the greatest impact on the individual recipient, who receives an opportunity to move between home and host countries. Since virtually all Fulbright scholars have students and will subsequently have even more, not to mention colleagues, the impact of the program actually multiplies exponentially. In fact, this iconic grant program that appears on its face to be changing one scholar at a time is in fact capable-through this ripple effect-of internationalizing entire curricula.
