Three Vanderbilt faculty and one staff member are living the university's commitment to radical collaboration across borders as Fulbright U.S. Scholar award recipients.
James Cracraft, Ana Christina da Silva Iddings, Tatiana Peredo and Norbert Ross have four distinct research agendas, but they share a common goal: closing the distance between people. They're doing their Fulbright projects in Taiwan, Norway, Chile and Mexico.
Established by Congress in 1946 to advance cross-cultural exchange and understanding, the Fulbright Program connects U.S. students, scholars and professionals with opportunities to study, teach and conduct research in more than 160 countries.
Roughly 800 Fulbright Scholar grants are awarded nationwide each year; Vanderbilt receiving four in a single cycle is exceptional.
"Having four Fulbright U.S. Scholar award recipients in a single year is an extraordinary achievement that reflects the excellence of our faculty and staff and Vanderbilt's deep commitment to advancing knowledge through global engagement," Provost C. Cybele Raver said. "From strengthening international partnerships and expanding multilingual education, to improving early literacy and amplifying the voices of underserved communities, these scholars are addressing complex challenges through collaboration across cultures."
Vanderbilt's Fulbright scholars are building institutional bridges across cultures, reimagining multilingual education through AI, making early literacy possible for children who need it most, and using community theater to illuminate the experiences of those who go overlooked.
Through the Fulbright International Education Administrator Seminar, James Cracraft, who is associate director of the English Language Center, spent two weeks exploring Taiwanese universities, vocational schools and government agencies to understand the country's approach to internationalization and language learning. After teaching English in Taiwan in the '90s, he returned as an administrator with an eye toward academic exchange programs and partnerships that could benefit Vanderbilt students and the ELC.
Ana Christina da Silva Iddings, professor emerita of the practice of elective learning at Peabody College of education and human development, is taking her work on immigrant education and multilingual families to Norway to investigate how AI and digital platforms are reshaping multilingual education. In partnership with colleagues at the University of Oslo-whose approach to digital life and multilingualism closely mirrors her own-she'll document multilingual family practices, work alongside teachers in linguistically diverse schools, and co-design curricula that merge home and community literacies into the classroom. Her goal is to bridge U.S. and Norwegian scholarship to inform teacher education in both countries and open new pathways for families navigating life in more than one language.
In Santiago, Chile, Tatiana Peredo, research assistant professor of special education at Peabody, is putting books in the hands of toddlers whose families are experiencing economic hardship, laying the groundwork for literacy before formal schooling begins. The project builds on her career-long focus on culturally sustaining early interventions for Latino families, and on a research alignment she found with colleagues at Universidad del Desarrollo. Peredo hopes the pilot will generate data to support a larger-scale study her Chilean collaborators will lead.
The number of people who have disappeared in Mexico is an open secret. Faced with government inaction, bands of shovel-carrying women-mothers, wives-spend years searching for loved ones, often losing themselves in the process. Norbert Ross, associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Science, is spending a year in Xalapa, Veracruz, working alongside these women's collectives. Using Playback Theatre, an improvisational storytelling form honed over a decade of work in El Salvador and Tijuana refugee camps, he hopes to create space where their grief can be expressed, their stories heard and the women themselves seen.
Together, the four Fulbright Scholar projects embody what radical collaboration looks like beyond Vanderbilt's campus.
"Their work exemplifies the spirit of discovery and impact that defines Vanderbilt and demonstrates how academic partnerships around the world enrich our research, teaching and service," Raver said.
