Five Duke Students Receive Prestigious National Fellowship

Five Duke students have been awarded Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Grants. The U.S. Department of Education provides these grants to universities to support individual doctoral fellowships for graduate and professional students who are conducting research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies for periods of six to 12 months.

Duke was one of 39 institutions to receive the 2017 grants, a record number for the institution. In the 2017 competition, a total of 66 institutional grant applications were submitted, which included 340 individual fellowship applications that resulted in 91 fellowships.

This year’s Duke recipients and their areas of research are: Robert Franco – history (Mexico; The Netherlands); Gray Fielding Kidd – history (Brazil); James A. Nealy Jr. – history (Russian Federation); Matthew R. Sebastian – cultural anthropology (Uganda); and Stephanie F. Stefanski – environmental economics (Argentina).

“We are delighted that so many Duke students have been selected for this prestigious and competitive award,” said Giovanni Zanalda, principal investigator for the DDRA and director of the Duke University Center for International and Global Studies (DUCIGS), which administers this program at Duke.

For more information on the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Competition, visit https://igs.duke.edu/opportunities/fulbright-hays-doctoral-dissertation-research-abroad-competition-open.