Two Elon University faculty members were granted Fulbright awards — one of the highest honors in academia that comes with grants and living stipends — to explore religious practices in India and neighborhood revitalization practices in the United Kingdom.
The awardees, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Amy Allocco and Adjunct Assistant of Political Science and Policy Studies Professor Patrick Harman, plan to use the opportunity to live abroad and further their existing studies in their respective interests.
This July, Allocco is set to travel to India, where she will remain for up to one year to observe and interview Hindu families who conduct complex ceremonies in an effort to communicate with dead family members. Intended to call the deceased back into the mortal world to safeguard those they left behind, Allocco hopes to explain the practice to a Western audience through both recording rituals and interviewing participants.
Harman intends to embark for the United Kingdom in January 2016 to work alongside social scientists at Durham University to identify neighborhood-rebuilding projects deemed most effective by politicians, nonprofits and members of the communities represented.
"I hope to gain an understanding of what strategies and policies are effective for community revitalization and for which sets of stakeholders (community organizations vs. policymakers)," Harman said in an email. "Ideally, I would gain some insight into how these differing strategies and policies can be aligned in a revitalization effort."
Administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, along with the U.S. State Department, the Fulbright Scholar Program each year sends about 800 U.S. faculty and professionals to more than 150 countries to lecture, research or participate in seminars, according to the program website.