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Schools

Tucker Resident Awarded Fulbright Scholarship

Allison Cohen will travel to China on a Language Studies grant.

Allison Cohen of Emory University has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarship to China in Classical Languages & Literature, the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board announced recently.

Cohen, a recent Emory graduate, will be traveling to China this fall with her daughter. For her studies, she was awarded two different Fulbright grants. The first, a “Critical Language Enhancement Award,” is for a program run through Middlebury College. The four-month grant will cover a full semester of Chinese immersion studies.

Following that, she will spend ten months working on her Fulbright project, which will focus on two Chinese translations of the “Lack of Essence,” a foundational chapter within the short but seminal Buddhist text, the Samdhinirmocana Sutra. While one of the Chinese translations was conducted by the Indian monk Paramartha, who traveled to China in the 6th century, the other translation she will examine was carried out by the Chinese monk Xuánzàng, who traveled to India almost a century later. Cohen is interested in analyzing these two translational approaches and hopes to expand her knowledge of the differences between Indian and Chinese culture informed by the translators’ divergent backgrounds and training. She hopes to gain insight into how such differences inform translation style, word selection, and contextual interpretations of the text.

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On being awarded the Fulbright scholarship, Cohen said that she is “very excited for the opportunity to do research in another country and also to be able to do a translation study in a full-immersion program.  I’m just really grateful.”

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The primary source of funding for the Fulbright Program is an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations in foreign countries and in the United States also provide direct and indirect support. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The Program operates in over 155 countries worldwide.

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The Fulbright Program provides 8,000 grants annually to undertake graduate study, advanced research, university lecturing, and classroom teaching. As of 2010, 300,000 persons - 114,000 from the United States and 188,000 from other countries - have participated in the program since it began. 

Recent budget cuts, however, have threatened funding for the Fulbright program, including the Fulbright-Hays program, which funds programs for K-12 students in public schools. Cohen spoke passionately on these budget cuts, urging those concerned to contact their representatives in Congress and communicate that Fulbright should remain in existence.  Fulbright “funds dissertations for area students' doctoral studies,” and cutting these funds “affects future plans to earn advanced degrees,” she said. 

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