Awards and Honors, Faculty News

Coburn Awarded Fulbright Global Scholar Award

Faculty member Noah Coburn is a 2022-2023 recipient of The Fulbright Global Scholar Award, which will allow him to focus on the teaching of conflict using interdisciplinary methods at liberal arts-style universities in three very different post-conflict settings: Fulbright University Vietnam, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany, and RIT Kosovo (formerly the American University of Kosovo).

Fulbright logo

Awarded each year, The Fulbright Global Scholar Award allows US academics and professionals to engage in multi-country, trans-regional projects. As a truly worldwide award, US scholars will be able to propose research or combined teaching/research activity in two to three countries with flexible schedule options; trips can be conducted within one academic year or spread over two consecutive years. 

“Each of these institutions takes an innovative approach to liberal arts, which have overlaps with Bennington’s history of progressive teaching and learning,” says Coburn. “I’m excited to think about how each place creates learners who engage with their own country’s history of conflict.”

Building on his experience of teaching about conflict to American, Afghan, and other international students, Coburn will look at how each of these places with a very different post-conflict history, think about the relationship between educating students and a history of conflict. 

Coburn will be spending two months at each institution, where he will teach an abridged interdisciplinary course on conflict and the war in Afghanistan, while asking students to conduct joint ethnographic, self-reflective writing, and conducting his own research on how teaching and learning about conflict happens in these settings. This will result in a series of scholar publications, but also public lectures and hopefully the design of courses and potentially a curriculum, which could be shared by these schools and others to think more internationally about how we teach undergraduates about these crucial topics.