Four U of I Professors Receive Fulbright Awards to Conduct Research Abroad

MOSCOW, Idaho — Four University of Idaho professors have received Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awards for the 2024-25 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

“The Fulbright Scholar Program is an outstanding way for our faculty to expand their research horizons into the international community,” Vice President for Research and Economic Development Chris Nomura said. “These programs allow them to not only engage in the global research enterprise, but also learn about other cultures while representing University of Idaho abroad.”

This year, U of I’s four Fulbright scholars — the most since the university had five in 2019-20 — will be studying everything from sustainable jet fuel and Walt Whitman translations to extremist violence and river plants.

John Crepeau, professor of mechanical engineering, will be researching sustainable aviation fuels at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. There is a large push to make aviation fuel more sustainable and to determine how these fuels affect different parts of a jet engine, and he will be working with students there to optimize the performance of these fuels on the total performance of the engines.

Zachary Turpin, associate professor of English, will pursue research and teaching activities at Technische Universität Dortmund (TUD) in Dortmund, Germany. With his project, “Intercultural Approaches to Translating Walt Whitman,” he will be collaborating with TUD scholars to study the evolving approaches (over the last century-plus) to translating American poet Walt Whitman’s dictionary-scouring verse — and specifically, to examine how translators handle his many word coinages, i.e., those unique words that the poet didn’t merely find or borrow but created specifically for his poetics, such as “presidentiad,” “poemet,” “venerealee,” “fatherstuff,” “yawp” and dozens more.

Brian Wolf, professor of criminology, will be affiliating with the Center for Research on Extremist Violence at the University of Oslo, Norway. There, he will pursue a project that examines the problem of extremist violence in advanced and developed democracies. Utilizing a comparative criminological analysis, Wolf will examine and contrast responses to extremist violence in Europe, and especially Norway. The results of this project will be used to assess the causes — and possible solutions — to extremist violence in Europe and North America.

Elowyn Yager, professor of civil and environmental engineering and co-director of the Center for Ecohydraulics Research, will be studying how vegetation roots influence the strength of riverbanks, which is important for controlling river erosion during floods. She will be conducting laboratory experiments on root strength at the University of Trento in Italy and field measurements in a well-studied Italian river with a group of international collaborators.

More than 800 individuals teach or conduct research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program annually, and since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 400,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists and professionals of all backgrounds with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research abroad. Notable Fulbrighters include 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, 41 heads of state or government and thousands of leaders across the private, public and nonprofit sectors.

For more information about the Fulbright Program, visit fulbrightprogram.org.

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