Hoffman is originally from Chelsea, Vt. He credits his college mentors, particularly Professors Martin Oyata, Cao Chunjing, and Brit Chase in the Fellowships Office for pushing him academically and intellectually while at UVM. After completing his Fulbright experience he plans to return to the U.S. and pursue a master’s degree in Chinese-English translation and interpretation. He ultimately plans to work as a language interpreter for the U.S. government or in the private sector.

Emma Kantrov ’12 has been awarded an English teaching assistantship to Brazil for the 2014 academic year. She will be teaching at a university and mentoring Brazilian students who will go on to become English language teachers throughout the country.

While at UVM, Kantrov majored in environmental sciences and minored in Spanish. She spent extensive time outside of the classroom working as a teacher and a tutor in after school programs run by the Burlington school district as well as the Sara Holbrook Community Center. Her experience tutoring refugees, immigrants and English language learners in the Burlington area inspired her to pursue science education as a career. The Fulbright will enable her to build on her teaching experiences while also perfecting her Spanish and Portuguese language skills.

Kantrov credits her college mentors, particularly Portuguese language professor Debora Teixeira, for their mentorship and support throughout the Fulbright application process. Originally from Lexington, Mass., she plans to return to the Boston area after her Fulbright experience and teach science in a high school that caters to newly arrived immigrants.

Brienne Toomey ’12 was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Germany for the 2013-2014 academic year. She will teach English as well as American government, history and civics, and she will also serve as an adviser to German teachers who teach English.

A North Andover, Mass. native, Toomey came to UVM to pursue environmental studies and to prepare to embark on a career that focused on environmental resource conservation. Her study of German language and culture (she was a double environmental studies and German major) played a prominent role in how she thought of promoting sustainable living in society. While studying abroad in Germany during her junior year, she saw how the country had made significant changes to its energy generation and transportation practices in order to live in a more sustainable and energy efficient manner. During her Fulbright year, Toomey plans to explore these practices and potentially bring these ideas back to organizations in the U.S.

Toomey graduated from UVM magna cum laude and as an Honors College scholar. While at the university she was an active participant in the DREAM Mentoring Program, and she regularly contributed her art work to The Water Tower. Since graduating she has been working for the National Gardening Association in Burlington. After returning from Germany in 2014, Toomey plans to continue her work in renewable technologies and sustainable initiatives.

A rigorous undergraduate intellectual experience is required to assemble a strong Fulbright proposal, and Toomey credits her mentors in the German and Russian language department for pushing her to perfect her language and enable her to study language through a cultural lens. She says Professors Wolfgang Mieder, Dennis Mahoney, Helga Schrekenberger, and Adrianna Borra were especially influential in her studies.

Doubleday, Hodulik, Hoffman, Kantrov, and Toomey are five of more than 1,500 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2013-2014 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. 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 more than 155 countries worldwide.

Since 2005, when the university put a centralized fellowship outreach and support program in place, 125 UVM students have won or been finalists in the country's most prestigious and competitive competitions, including the Fulbright, Rhodes, Goldwater, Marshall, Udall, Truman, Madison, Critical Language, SMART, Gilman and Boren Overseas scholarships.

Two of the “houses” in the Living/Learning Center’s Global Village challenged one another to a friendly yet competitive cook-off in an effort to raise money for an orphanage in Kirov, Russia. Commonly referred to as the Epic Food Battle of 2012, the “food fight” took place in the Fireplace Lounge of the Living and Learning Center Nov. 7 (ironically, the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution). The German House’s Stephanie Forristall, an exchange student from the University of Augsburg, and the Russian House’s Kristen Rousse organized a widely attended culinary evening along with fellow students from their respective residential learning houses. 

Nine members of the German House (Bruce Barger, Tracy Guion, Samuel Janidlo, Kara Pratt, Patrick Ryan, CharlieDan Sheffy, Erin Skelly, Allie Sullivan, and Stephanie) as well as an equal number of Russian majors from the Russian House (Veronica Rock, Nicolas Chlebak, Dalina Ceku, Tatiana Rumsey, John Mauran, Corey Pariseau, Rubin Goldberg, Jake Pelland, and Kristen) organized themselves into small “kollektivs” for purposes of preparing a wide array of national dishes for the event.

With the help of faculty director Professor Dennis Mahoney, German House students prepared käsespätzle (cheese noodle casserole), two kinds of apfelkuchen (apple cake), sauerbraten (pot roast), kartoffelpuffer (potato pancake), schwarzwälder (Black Forest cake) brownies and apple twists. They also served apple sauce for the potato pancakes and some rather tasty non-alcoholic drinks.

As faculty director of the Russian House, I made my contribution to the evening’s “cook-off” by staying out of the kitchen; but under Kristen Rousse’s direction Russian House students prepared a delicious array of борщ/borscht, пельменные/pel’mennye (fried dumplings), блины/bliny, шарлотта с яблоками/ sharlotta s yablokami (apple cake), салад столичный/salad stolichnyi and, of course, Russian печения/pecheniya (cookies). 

Katie Boynton, former UVM Russian House student director and, now, UVM grad (class of 2012), was the guiding force for this event in suggesting that the Russian and German Houses work together in raising much-needed funds for a cash-strapped orphanage in Kirov, Russia. Since graduation Boynton has been working for a non-profit organization, Bright Connections, in the Philadelphia area, where she assists in fund-raising efforts for Russian orphanages to repair buildings, provide toys for the kids, and provide other basic services.

While the Germans once again went down in defeat to the Russians in this food-fight, a total of more than $330 was raised in contributions to the Kirov Orphanage: a most worthy undertaking with no victims or casualties to report! Judging by the unusually healthy (and hungry) turnout of UVM students for the event (approximately 90-100 in number), the evening was a “большой успех” and no one awakened “wurst” for the experience the following morning. Delighted by the turnout and even more so by the money raised, Professor Mahoney (the founding faculty director of Global Village in 2006-08) was most of all impressed by the enthusiasm and cooperation displayed by the students in both houses: an example of Residential Learning at its best!

The State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs notified graduate student Judith Marshall, juniors Monica Johnson and Hannah Doughty, and sophomore Shelby Deaton this past month that they received the award, which is a nationally competitive and prestigious opportunity. The Critical Language Scholarship Program offers intensive summer language institutes overseas in 13 critical-need languages. Language offerings include Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hindu, Urdu, Turkish and Persian.

Marshall, a graduate student from Jericho, Vt., will be studying intermediate Arabic in Tunis, Tunisia. Marshall is currently working toward a master's degree in history.

Doughty, a Rotary Scholar and a double Russian and anthropology major from Rochester, Vt., will be studying intermediate Russian. A member of UVM's Russian House, Doughty has been heavily involved in Russian language activities and events on campus. She will spend this summer studying Russian in either Vladimir, Kazan or Ufa. After the Critical Language Scholarship program, she plans to continue her language study in St. Petersburg.

Johnson, an anthropology major from West Warwick, R.I., received a Critical Language Scholarship to study advanced beginning Turkish. After taking a course on Middle Eastern politics at UVM, Johnson was intrigued by the role the country plays on a global scale, and she has spent the last semester studying language, politics and culture in Istanbul. She will spend this summer studying in Ankara.

Deaton, an Honors College sophomore from Kalispell, Mont., will be studying Arabic at the advanced beginning level. A double political science and history major, Deaton is very interested in the experience of women in the Middle East. She will also spend this summer studying in Tunis, Tunisia. After completing the critical language program in August, she will remain in the Middle East to study abroad in Jordan for the fall 2012 semester.

Marshall, Doughty, Johnson and Deaton are four of 575 students to receive the award (the competition received 5,200 applications from undergraduate and graduate students across the country). Critical Language Scholarship institutes provide fully funded group-based intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences for seven to 10 weeks for U.S. students. The CLS Program is part of a U.S. government effort to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical-need foreign languages. Participants are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship period, and later apply their critical language skills in their future professional careers.

Since 2005, when the university put a centralized fellowship outreach and support program in place, 91 UVM students have won or been finalists in the country’s most prestigious and competitive competitions, including the Fulbright, Rhodes, Goldwater, Marshall, Udall, Truman, Madison, Gilman, and Boren Overseas scholarships.

“I have two goals for the year,” Dahly says in an email interview, “to improve America’s reputation in the eyes of people who only see it through our pop culture, and to show how we’re all connected. As globalization spreads, we have to start thinking about culture: should one cling to its unique customs, or should one strive to erase boundaries? This is something I'm experimenting with here and trying to figure out where I stand. To ignore differences is naive, to emphasize them pushes people apart, and it's impossible to blindly preach, ‘it's not better, not worse, just different.’"

While Dahly faces these issues with young Russian college students (and faces cooking her first beet, a “headstrong tuber”), her classmate, Sam Vary, is building his rapid-fire Russian as a news producer in New York for Russian Television International (RTVi). During his interview he was invited along on a typical shoot, in this case to cover the trial of French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Given his command of the language, Vary was offered the job on the spot. The only American working in the bureau, his assignments range from news translations to identifying key events to cover; supervising photographers and reporters on the scene to making connections with the White House, the mayor’s office, FBI and major art institutions to gaining access across the yellow tape at crime scenes… heady stuff for a 22-year-old.

“'Foreign’ journalism,” says Vary, who double-majored in Film and Television Studies, “is something I feel passionate about. New York is such a vibrant environment, I’m making valuable connections -- I feel like I can go anywhere from here.”

Hard talk

UVM’s Russian majors have a history of success -- Joe Bowman ’01 was a founding partner of the first venture capital firm in Russia -- but as a group this year’s graduates show particular “industriousness and ingenuity” notes Professor Kevin McKenna. Oliver Chase, a Fulbright finalist with a double major in economics, landed a sales job in Moscow with a medical sports product distributor. (Chase, a high school chess champion, originally learned Russian with the dream of competing in Moscow speaking the native language. He spent a year abroad studying at St. Petersburg University while playing chess tournaments on the side.)

Peace Corp finalist Sam Mishcon, with a double major in Japanese, is awaiting his assignment in either Ukraine or Moldova. After spending a month in St. Petersburg over the summer, Ross Cunningham, also a double major in economics, is a first-year law student at George Washington University where he’s considering a career in international law.

There are a couple of things that all of these students have in common besides an incredible facility for language (Dahly has a Spanish minor, Cunningham a minor in French). Russian, as McKenna will testify, is difficult but somehow seductive.

“The harder I worked at it,” says Vary, “the more I fell in love with it.”

Dahly says she was thinking of dropping Russian after her first two semesters because it was “so miserably difficult and demanding.” But two years in, “something clicked and I became infatuated with everything Russian.”

The other thing that ties them is Professor McKenna, ambassador, mentor, tough coach and ultimate cheerleader. “Typically,” he says, “I have lines of students outside my door.” They come to continue class conversations about Russian literature, to talk about potential careers or study abroad -- all passions of his. In a small department, students tend to take one or two classes with McKenna every semester.

“He showed us all what we are capable of,” says Dahly. “He constantly pushed us far beyond what we thought were our limits and we ended up realizing, basically, ‘what we were made of!’ That’s a hugely important lesson to learn in college.” She also enthusiastically mentions, as does McKenna, relatively new assistant professor Kathleen Scollins who “provided dazzling energy and unceasing encouragement and support… What a combination,” Dahly writes, “his high expectations and her encouragement -- it was incredible.”

Outside of the classroom, McKenna sends every current major a postcard when he’s in Russia, exchanges emails with former students about their accomplishments and has plans to meet up with those he can when he’s in Moscow this fall.

In the classroom, apparently, he can talk tough. “I point out to every one of my students, ‘don’t find yourself on June 1 not having a job lined up in advance,’” McKenna says, banging his hand on the table for emphasis. Not quite Khrushchev and his shoe, but students apparently take the point.

University of Vermont senior Kirsti Dahly has been awarded a Fulbright English teaching assistantship to Russia for the 2011-2012 academic year. She will teach English as well as American government, history and civics at Ugra University, in Khanty-Mansiysk, and she will also serve as an adviser to Russian teachers who teach English.

A Basking Ridge, N.J. native, Dahly was abroad in Norway for a year after high school; while there she transcended cultural and linguistic barriers to make several Russian friends. When she returned to the U.S. and began her studies at UVM, she began taking Russian classes so that she would be better able to communicate with her friends and learn more about their culture.

She became a Russian major, and she credits Russian professor Kevin McKenna for pushing her academically, as well as supporting her as she continued to advance intellectually and personally. Dahly spent the spring of 2010 studying abroad in St. Petersburg as she continued to work on her language skills and volunteered with the teaching of English in a university classroom. As a Fulbright Scholar, Dahly will have the chance to perfect her Russian as well as her teaching, and when she returns to the U.S. she has expressed interest in becoming a Russian teacher.

University of Vermont graduate student Amanda Egan ’12 has been awarded a Fulbright research grant to Ukraine for the 2011-2012 academic year. Egan, a candidate for a master’s degree in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, will spend the coming academic year working with colleagues at the Institute of Ecological Economics, Ukrainian National Forestry University investigating opportunities for forest carbon projects in the Carpathian region in Ukraine. Forest carbon projects have the potential to mitigate climate change by incentivizing forest conservation. While strong potential for forest carbon projects exists in the Carpathian region, it has little experience developing these projects. A member of the UVM Carbon Dynamics Lab, led by Bill Keeton, and the UVM Forest Carbon and Communities Research Group, led by Cecilia Danks, Egan has spent her time at UVM studying community participation and engagement in forest carbon projects and other market-based forest conservation programs. Upon completing her research, Egan will present her work as part of her master’s thesis.

Climate change originally inspired Egan to pursue her Fulbright project. This Fulbright grant will be her first opportunity to work on this issue on an international scale. Egan, an Exeter, N.H. native, is UVM’s second graduate student from the Rubenstein School to win a Fulbright Scholarship to the Ukraine. In 2008, Sarah Crow, a former graduate student studying Natural Resources, won a Fulbright grant to study community-based forestry for sustainable development in the Carpathian region.

Madeline Murphy Hall ’10, a double anthropology and political science major, Green and Gold Scholar, Boren Scholar and Honors College graduate has been awarded a Fulbright research grant to Kuwait. Murphy Hall will partner with American University of Kuwait to study women’s suffrage. Her work will enable researchers to better understand how women are adjusting to their citizenship roles and responsibilities.

Hall, a Windsor, Vt. native, worked throughout her UVM career to become an advocate for women in the Middle East. She pushed herself to learn Arabic, and in 2009 she was awarded a Boren Scholarship to study abroad in Jordan. The Boren, which is one of the most prestigious national awards available to undergraduate students, acknowledged Murphy Hall for her outstanding academic achievement, her determination to perfect her Arabic skills, her desire to better understand the role of women in the Middle East, and for her goal to pursue a career in public service. She credits professors Peter VonDoepp, Jonah Steinberg and Gregory Gause for helping her pursue research related to women’s rights in the Middle East, and then further guiding her as she pursued the Boren, the Fulbright and other opportunities that would enable her to continue her work. In addition to her academic work and international experience, Hall was a dedicated and decorated member of the Lawrence Debate Union at UVM. She says that team coaches Alfred Snider and David Register offered her tremendous support as she pursued her academic and intellectual goals.

Christopher Morriss ’11 has been selected for an English Teaching Assistantship to Venezuela. Prior to his May notification from the Fulbright Program, however, Morriss had accepted an equally coveted opportunity with the Peace Corps in Ecuador. And so, while he is not able to accept the Fulbright award, Morriss will be pursuing similarly enriching work over the next two years in Ecuador where he will be working on issues related to public health. A double Biology and Spanish major and an Honors College student, Morriss excelled in the classroom; he was on the dean’s list during every semester at UVM, and in 2010 he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. Outside of the classroom, Morriss spent many hours volunteering to tutor refugee students in the Burlington area. As a pre-medical student, his goal is to become a bilingual physician, and he believes his time in South America will both enable him to perfect his Spanish language skills and introduce him to hands-on work in public health that will greatly benefit him in a future medical career.

Meryl Olson ’11, an agroecology doctoral candidate in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has been awarded a Fulbright grant to study sustainable agricultural practices in Sierra Leone. Olson will spend the year working with colleagues at Njala University in Freetown as well as with OneVillage Partners researching the benefits and limitations of lowland swamp rice farming done by small-scale farmers in eastern Sierra Leone. Her work will give farmers and policy makers a greater understanding of the opportunities as well as the barriers related to successful swamp rice farming, which will have a significant impact on farmer income as well as local food supply.

As an environmental engineer turned agroecologist, Olson has a tireless passion for working with poor people around the world and helping them develop a model for agriculture which meets human needs for food and crop production, as well as other ecological and environmental needs. Olson has previously conducted research in Latin America with small scale agriculture, but her Fulbright grant to Sierra Leone allows her to extend her research expertise as well as work in an area that has been historically neglected by agricultural researchers. Upon completing her studies, Olson will present her work to the Ministry of Agriculture in Sierra Leone, and from there she has expressed a desire to work for a nonprofit organization addressing environmental and poverty issues for small farmers in the U.S. as well as internationally.

Olson, a Bedford, N.H. native, credits Professor Ernesto Menendez for his guidance and support as she’s pursued her doctorate and her Fulbright award. She is UVM’s first Fulbright winner to Africa. The continent is perhaps the most competitive region in the Fulbright U.S. Student program.

April Orleans ’10, a community and international development major, has been awarded a Fulbright Research Grant to Trinidad and Tobago. Orleans will organize a large-scale community outreach and action plan in Tobago for raising awareness of the harmful effects of unsafe wastewater disposal on the islands. Part of the plan will be providing education for greater understanding of water quality in order to improve the country’s maritime ecosystem, fishing industry and economy. Orleans hopes her work on Tobago will be transferable to other islands in the Caribbean region.

Her Fulbright work in Trinidad and Tobago will be the third development project she will pursue in the Caribbean region. In 2007 she took Sustainable Development and Island Economies with Professor Gary Flomenhoft, a service-learning course where students spent two weeks working on community projects in St. Lucia. After her course was completed, she partnered with a UVM graduate student to create “Football for Lives,” an education project in St. Lucia based on a similar program started in Africa to teach AIDS prevention. She became a teaching assistant for the course, and continued to visit the island throughout her UVM career. In 2009 she continued her development work by taking Renewable Energies Workshop, another service-learning course where students spend time in Dominica. Orleans, a Virginia native, is currently working in Homer, Alaska; she will depart for Trinidad and Tobago this fall.

Dahly, Egan, Hall, Morriss, Olson and Orleans are six of more than 1,500 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2011-2012 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. 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 more than 155 countries worldwide.

In addition to the Fulbright Scholarship winners, UVM students or recent alumni this year have also won two Udall Scholarships, five Gilman Scholarships, a SMART scholarship from the U.S. Department of Defense; and two National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. UVM also had a Truman Scholarship finalist and five Fulbright finalists, in addition to the six winners.

Since 2005, when the university put a centralized fellowship outreach and support program in place, 60 UVM students have won or been finalists in the country’s most prestigious and competitive competitions, including the Fulbright, Rhodes, Goldwater, Marshall, Udall, Truman, Madison, Gilman, and Boren Overseas scholarships.

For himself Mieder merely chuckles at such advice as he dives into a discussion of his latest work, “Making a Way Out of No Way”: Martin Luther King’s Sermonic Proverbial Rhetoric, the 200^th book he’s written or edited. Mieder read some 6,000 pages of King’s published texts, collecting, cataloguing and analyzing, in the process, he says, telling the story of King’s life, a biography in proverbs. His comprehensive index -- more entertaining than the term implies -- is longer than the book’s 16 chapters, containing 1092 proverbs and proverbial phrases, each shown in every context that King used them, sourced and dated.

Here Mieder makes clear that King’s oratory gifts owe much to literature, the Bible and the rhetoric of great human rights leaders who came before him -- Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Parker. With King’s vast intellectual repertoire, coupled with the traditional anaphora or repetition of an African American preacher, “it was almost as if he were bombarding you,” says Mieder, using, he’s calculated, an average of one “wisdom expression” for every 5.5 pages of text.

Among King’s favorite phrases were Carlyle’s “no lie can live forever,” Donne’s “no man is an island entire of itself,” Jefferson’s “all men are created equal,” a quotation that takes on proverbial status through repetition, all employed, as Mieder writes, “as linguistic signs in the service of desegregation, civil rights, and freedom.” From King’s biblical stock, “love your enemies,” and “he who lives by the sword shall perish by it,” in essence define his nonviolent creed, Mieder says.

How to rock the pews

King of course used original language -- Mieder is convinced that King coined “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” -- and yet he relied heavily on what Mieder calls “set pieces,” proverb-rich speech that could be easily summoned and powerfully received. If King ever edged toward cliché, overusing expressions at times, Mieder reminds that while he may have noticed, having obsessively combed the entirety of his work at once, King often gave two speeches a day, certainly 300 a year, many of which were spontaneous and generally to a different audience.

In contrast, Barack Obama, whose proverbial rhetoric Mieder wrote about in his 2009 book, Yes We Can, has no such luxury with an ever-present media. Obama, for the most part, makes careful, studied use of proverbs, using three or four in a speech, according to Mieder. His basic intuition aligns with King’s.

“Using a proverbial or metaphorically proverbial element from time to time gives a speech a certain amount of emotion, warmth -- and also lets the audience identify with what you’re saying,” Mieder explains.

Obama freely acknowledges his debt as an orator to Douglass, Lincoln and especially King. Standing on the shoulders of giants, a favorite proverbial metaphor of Mieder’s, whether talking about rhetoricians or his own scholarly heroes.

Civil discourse

Having previously written about the use of proverbs in the speeches not just of Obama but also of those giants Douglass and Lincoln, Making a Way Out of No Way fills in a great 20^th century gap. That title, an African American proverb of unknown origin, characterizes for Mieder all that King stood for in his struggle for universal human rights, despite the ubiquity of “I have a dream.”

“You see, ‘I have a dream’ is different,” Mieder says. “’I have a dream’ is just ‘I have an idea, I have a wish.’ ‘Making a way out of no way’ expresses what he did with word and deed.”

Mieder has a soft spot for King, having arrived in America from Germany in 1960 at the age of 16. From his vantage as a teenager in Detroit, living with an ideologically progressive family, the cause of civil rights made its mark.

Talking to Mieder and reading his often moving analysis of King’s use of language it becomes clear that anyone tempted to trivialize proverb study should rethink. While proverbs run the gamut from silly to slurs, they communicate human experience, representing an idea, says Mieder, often as naturally as normal words.

“It behooves us to pay attention to (proverbs) because they are powerful,” Mieder says. “They are not sacrosanct, they are not simplistic. In fact they can be terribly dangerous…sometimes language is tricky. We don’t think enough about language.”

Mieder undoubtedly does think enough about language. With his comprehensive knowledge of proverbs it’s clear that he is linguist, historian, philosopher with a reach into countless other fields of study. He admits he can sit at his desk happily for 15 hours at a stretch.

“Maybe the word 'workaholic' isn’t only negative,” Mieder posits. “I would at least add the adjective a damn happy workaholic.” Almost a proverb, if it could only catch on.

Three of the scholars, from left to right: Matthew Greene '10, Dzeneta Karabegovic '08 and Emily Lubell '09. (Photo: Sally McCay)

Four University of Vermont students have been awarded prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Program Scholarships to pursue independent research or teach abroad.

University of Vermont alumnus Dzeneta Karabegovic '08 has been awarded a scholarship to pursue an independent research project on social networks within the Bosnian diaspora population in Sweden. She will spend the year with researchers at Uppsala University working to get a better understanding of how diaspora members interact with their community and the greater Swedish population. A better understanding of diaspora social networks, she says, will lead to better immigration and integration policies for the population. This research will be a continuation of the work she did as a UVM student for her honors thesis.

A better understanding of these populations is important to Karabegovic, who is a Bosnian native. She immigrated to the United States when she was young, and settled in the Burlington area. As a student at UVM, Karabegovic was a member of the Honors College, a double-major in political science and German, a John Dewey Scholar, an inductee into Pi Sigma Alpha (National Political Science Honors Society), and was a founding member of the Bosnian Lillies, a Bosnian dance group. When she returns to the United States she plans to attend either law or graduate school so that she can continue to help Diaspora populations in the U.S. and abroad.

Hannah LeMieux '10 has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Turkey for the 2010-2011 academic year. She will work as an English teaching assistant for a university in the southeastern part of the country. The Phillipston, Mass. native and English major was an involved member of the campus community during her time at UVM. LeMieux was the treasurer of the Student Government Association, president of the women's rugby club, a Pottery Cooperative member and a writing tutor. She was named a Kidder Scholar in 2008, Living & Learning Member of the Year in 2008, a Buckham Scholar in 2009, and was given the Unsung Hero Award by the Department of Student Life in 2010. Her experience as an English major and her time as a writing tutor will enable her to help Turkish university students perfect their English language skills, and her desire to make a difference in her community will help her make a positive impression abroad.

Emily Lubell '09 has been awarded a scholarship to pursue an independent research project on the correlation between socioeconomic status and the prevalence of kidney stones among the population in Arica, Chile. Lubell will spend the year working with public health officials determining if people of a lower socioeconomic standing are more susceptible to kidney stones. If that's the case, Lubell plans to investigate Arica's drinking water and determine if the quality of the city's drinking water combined with a lack of access to bottled water is leaving poorer residents at higher risk for kidney stones.

For Lubell, the Fulbright award is her opportunity to continue research she started while studying abroad. Lubell, who was inspired by her UVM courses and professors to pursue a career in public health, was participating in a public health research program in Arica during the spring of 2009. Lubell studied Arica's potable water quality and was appalled to discover that the level of hardness in the city's drinking water was well over the maximum level recommended by world health authorities. While in Chile she hypothesized that the hardness of the water (a well-known cause of kidney stones) may be putting all residents at risk, but especially the residents who were too poor to buy bottled water. The Fulbright scholarship will enable her to complete her research.

Lubell, a Natick, Mass. native and psychology major, graduated from UVM this past December, and has been working for the Vermont Child Health Improvement Program in Burlington. She will leave for Chile in March; when she comes back she plans on becoming a public health official.

Matthew Greene '10 has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in the Czech Republic for the 2010-2011 academic year. He will work as an English teaching assistant for two high schools in the small Czech city of Havlickuv Brod, located in the middle of the country.

Greene, a Westerly, R.I. native, European studies major and avid linguist, became enamored with the Czech Republic while he was studying abroad in Austria during the 2008-2009 academic year. Matthew already spoke German and Italian, but he begged his Czech friends to teach him their language. Learning the language enabled Matthew to learn a lot more about the Czech people, and he become fascinated by Czech history and culture. He also recognized that the Czech people were just as enthusiastic about learning his language as he was about learning theirs. He hopes that by the end of his year abroad he will be fluent in Czech and his students will have a strong understanding of English.

His intercultural experiences will not end with his Fulbright year. Greene plans on returning to the U.S. to pursue a graduate degree focusing on Central European studies, specifically related to Austria and the Czech Republic. He eventually plans to enter the Foreign Service and work as a representative of the U.S. in a Central European country.

Karabegovic, LeMieux, Lubell and Greene are four of more than 1,500 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2010-2011 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. 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 more than 155 countries worldwide.

Watch three of the scholars talk about their awards and plans:

Bower will focus on women's experiences during and after the Holocaust and offer a feminist critique of patriarchal forces in history that link Ruth Klüger's memoir Still Alive and Judy Chicago's art exhibition The Holocaust Project. While Klüger draws on the authenticity of her own experiences as a persecuted Jew in Vienna and a child survivor of a series of concentration camps, Chicago's association with the Holocaust is based on research, reflection and a Jewish self-understanding with affinities to the victims as well as the ethical mission of tikkun ("mending the world"). Professor Bower explores the ways in which these two women seek to write female experience back into history and examines the complexity of the terms "witness" and "remembrance" in the context of Holocaust representation as the event recedes ever further into the past.

Bower received her undergraduate degree from UVM in 1986, majoring in German and psychology; she earned her doctorate in German literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1994.

As I write this I am sitting in the very same flat in St. Petersburg that I was in last semester, with the very same host family. They don't speak any English, but I don't mind: it keeps things interesting and I get the practice I need. I am currently in my junior year. I started my study of Russian at the beginning of my studies at UVM. This semester I am particularly happy because a few of my friends from UVM are joining me. We all sat together in the same classes since our first year. And it is just really neat to do it all together.

I am very glad that I decided to spend two semesters abroad. I have already built many lasting relationships. I returned home between semesters and missed the friends I had made abroad. During my stay here I particularly enjoy going to the city's many museums, going to the theater, and playing in chess tournaments. I am very proud of the fact that I've actually managed to make a little scratch in these chess tournaments, as Russians have a reputation of being particularly good at the game.

I am greatly appreciative that Prof. McKenna exposes his students to Russian proverbs in his intermediate Russian class. I was a bit skeptical when I was first introduced to the study of proverbs. However, my first couple weeks abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia already affirmed that the class time we spent memorizing some of the many Russian proverbs went to good use.

As a Russian language learner proverbs are particularly useful. I found that they were used much more commonly in Russian speech than in English. Personally, I see them as the cheat codes to the language: by reciting one I know that I'm guaranteed a sentence of completely flawless Russian. In this sense I can sometimes make it seem like I speak Russian better than I do.

I distinctly remember speaking with my host family during one of our first breakfasts together and uttering something similar to "The early bird catches the worm." In my case it would literally translate to "God gives to he who rises early." I know it sounds strange in English but there is a rhyme to it in Russian. Anyway, I rather timidly recited the words during breakfast conversation to test the ice and members of my host family were not only very impressed by my knowledge of these wise words, but they jumped with joy at the fact that this very important part of their language and culture hadn't been overlooked by the rest of the world. Due to my newfound interest in proverbs abroad I plan to continue formal study of the subject by taking a class offered by Prof. Wolfgang Mieder upon my return to UVM.

Russia is beautiful. St. Petersburg is one of the prettiest cities in the world and has a very rich culture and history. I am having the time of my life here and the opportunities provided to me by UVM and the Department of German and Russian have made this all possible. I am very thankful to have received a Department of German and Russian scholarship as it has assisted me greatly to have these life changing adventures studying abroad.

As far as plans for post graduation, I'm still not sure. As of late, I would ultimately like to become an entrepreneur. I might go to business graduate school for this but I change my mind an awful lot. At one point while at UVM I wanted to be an engineer, then a computer scientist, then a psychologist. Basically, I've had some really great professors at UVM that have instilled a passion for me in a lot of subject areas. Government service is always in the back of my mind. Right now I'm looking for various summer internships. If I don't find anything that captures my heart, I'll probably go to the Ukraine, get a job teaching English, and try my luck at learning that language. Either way, I'll always be a lifelong learner.

I can't recommend this route (studying abroad) enough to prospective students. As far as a reason for my personal decision to begin the study of the Russian language, the best I can give is fate.

What's happened to the public memory of Kristallnacht -- a night of violence and vandalism perpetrated against the German Jewish community in 1938? According to historian Alan Steinweis' new book, participation in the brutality was more widespread among civilians than scholarly writing and German public perception would indicate today. (Photo: Sally McCay)

Poring over court records and first-hand accounts from those who witnessed Kristallnacht, the single largest instance of public violence against the Jewish people inside Germany before the Second World War, Alan E. Steinweis, professor of history and director of the Center for Holocaust Studies, revealed a disturbing truth: the Nazis weren't the only ones who assaulted Jews and burned their synagogues and businesses during what was considered a major escalation in the Nazi program of Jewish persecution leading to the Holocaust.

In his new book, Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard University Press), Steinweis ascertains that thousands of German citizens, neighbors to the Jewish residents who were persecuted on the "Night of Broken Glass," participated in the rioting across hundreds of German communities and encouraged Nazi Storm Troopers as they carried out the orders of Adolf Hitler. Steinweis' findings, supported by detailed accounts of individuals on both sides of the event, significantly change the established narrative on the event that describes it as a top-down organized atrocity perpetrated exclusively by the Nazi regime.

Kristallnacht was a pogrom -- a riot against an ethnic or religious group that results in death and destruction of their homes, businesses, and religious centers -- that resulted in the deaths of more than 90 Jewish residents and the rounding up of 30,000 Jewish men who were sent to concentration camps. The event was sparked by the shooting of a Paris-based German diplomat named Ernst vom Rath by Hershel Grynszpan, a despondent Jewish teenager.

"The original contribution is that the picture of the violence of that night in 1938 that comes out of the trial materials is substantially different than how Germans today perceive the event and scholars have written about it," says Steinweis, who spent almost two years in Germany studying court transcripts and other descriptions of the event that were recently made available. "Popular participation in the event by regular Germans was suppressed so the commonly told version of the event has been exculpatory for ordinary Germans. These personal accounts presented an unpleasant reality that Germans wanted to forget."

Defining participation

Steinweis, who grew up in New York City and came to UVM in 2009 from the University of Nebraska, goes to great lengths in the book to define participation -- an important distinction when estimating the size of the atrocity. Steinweis considers a number of potential participants including German residents who looted businesses after the violence subsided; residents who stood by and watched the burning of synagogues and their contents on the street; and those who expressed support of the anti-semitic pogrom and egged on the Storm Troopers. "I would argue that if you were to include all of these individuals, the total participants would be in the tens of thousands."

Although Stenweis' primary focus in the book, which has received positive reviews including one by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, is on the expanded number of Germans who partook in Kristallnacht, he makes a point to write about the many German residents who went out of their way to help Jewish neighbors whose lives were destroyed by the event.

The motive

Steinweis touches on a number of other fascinating themes surrounding Kristallnacht, including the reason Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath. Originally arrested and held by French authorities for the Paris shooting, Grynszpan was seized by the Gestapo after the German invasion of France and brought to Germany for a "show trial." It's generally accepted that Grynspan killed vom Rath in response to the arrest of his parents, along with 12,000 other Polish Jews who were stripped of their property and herded aboard trains bound for Poland.

Steinweis explores another motive given by Grynszpan, who claimed that he and vom Rath had been lovers; when vom Rath dumped him he wanted revenge. Although most historians don't subscribe to this theory, reports of both Grynszpan and vom Rath spending time in Paris' burgeoning gay scene, albeit separately, give credence to it. Some believe Grynszpan concocted the theory in hopes the Nazis would never try the case out of embarrassment that one of their diplomats was homosexual.

In an intriguing examination of why the Nazis decided to orchestrate the Kristallnacht, Steinweis explores the idea that it occurred because vom Rath died of his injuries on the anniversary of Hitler's failed attempt to take over the Bavarian Government in 1923. That same night, a group of Nazi leaders gathered in Munich to commemorate the anniversary with the Nazi Minister of Propaganda telling participants it was time to strike at the Jews. Nazi leaders sent instructions to their men not to act as if they were going to launch the pogrom, but were to participate all the same. Rioting erupted hours later.

Steinweis says something would have happened in the wake of vom Rath's death regardless of timing, but finds it interesting that a similar killing of a Nazi official by an angry Jewish youth occurred two years prior to Kristallnacht, yet there was almost no response from the Nazis.

"This book is different from my last two because it was written with a crossover readership in mind," says Steinweis, who credits his editor who specializes in helping academics write to a broader audience. "I've gotten emails from people who bought the book at a Barnes and Noble and said they appreciated how readable it was. The question is how do you write history that is both rigorous in a scholarly respect and accessible to more than a few hundred people in your profession."

"This is the best memoir I've read about Russia since Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory," says Russian professor Kevin McKenna, who was invited to read the manuscript by Gorokhova's daughter, one of his students. The book was just published by Simon & Schuster.

A Mountain of Crumbs paints a stark vision of childhood in the 1960s and '70s under communist rule in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Telling her story, Gorokhova makes class and politics personal, sometimes in the extreme -- her great uncle, taken in the middle of the night, eventually shot for making an anti-Soviet joke. And she writes a coming-of-age tale that's ripe with the impact of scarcity.

According to a review in The New York Times, "...hunger and curiosity prompt some of [the] memoir's most evocative passages. Reading translations of Western writers in a small literary magazine, Ms. Gorokhova finds herself 'stumbling over oysters in Francoise Sagan and a vegetable called asparagus in Iris Murdoch.'"

Gorokhova writes of that experience: "Even the word itself, 'asparagus,' sounds as decadent as 'pineapple' and 'quail' from a Mayakovsky poem, the two truly unsocialist foods eradicated in 1917 along with the czar." From an early age her hunger went beyond food to desire to learn English and break away from the Soviet Union as well as a mother she viewed as repressive as the state.

In 1980, at 24, Gorokhova emigrated to the U.S. where she received a doctorate in language education. She lives in New Jersey.

"Ashchheim is an exceptionally engaging speaker," says Alan Steinweis, professor of history and director of the Center for Holocaust Studies. "He's very skilled at making a serious subject entertaining. And he is without question one of the world's leading historians of German-Jewish intellectual history."

Using remarkable diaries, letters and lesser-known writings of three distinctive thinkers — Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt and Victor Klemperer — the lecture will examine their intimate reflections and what they reveal about their evolving identities and world views as each wrestled with new questions of evil and the meaning of being both German and Jewish before, during and after Hitler's Third Reich. This composite "history from within" seeks to shed new light on the complexity and drama of the 20th-century European and Jewish experience.

"His approach is novel," says Steinweis. "He's trying to get at this from the perspective of members of the victim group who were trying to figure out what made the perpetrators tick."

Aschheim holds the Vigevani Chair of European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is also director of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Centre for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. His many books include Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923; The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 and Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises.

The event is sponsored by the Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies.

In April, I sat down with Kevin to learn about his career, scholarship, and involvement in international studies at UVM. Here are some of the highlights from that conversation.

On his entry in the field of Russian language and literature:

In the 1960s, when I was in college, Russian and Soviet studies was very hot - Sputnik got all that going, and the National Defense Education Act made it possible for people like me to go to college. I had a Russian literature and two Russian history professors who were enormously inspiring mentors with whom I have remained friends after all these years. As I would watch particularly good professors, they always seemed to really enjoy what they were doing in the classroom. I would think, this is not a bad career is it? I knew probably by the early part of my sophomore year that this was something I wanted to do. I was deliriously happy when I got a fellowship to graduate school.

On serving as a Foreign Service officer in the Soviet Union during the mid-1970s, while conducting his Ph.D. research:

My dissertation topic was Catherine the Great as a writer of literature. I had applied for an IREX grant and had the misfortune of being granted the fellowship but turned down by the Russians. Clearly it was not research that I was going to be able to do in the United States. I had to go into the archives in Leningrad. That was quite a curve. I was a little bit more devious then than I am now. I did the next logical thing: I applied for the Foreign Service.

I applied to work on cultural exhibits in the Soviet Union. They came out of the Nixon Kitchen Debates from 1959. We showed aspects of typical American life. I worked on one called "Technology and the American Home." I did it for a year and three quarters, and it was the second best job I had in my life. The exhibits were so impossibly popular that it would be 30 degrees below zero and people would start to get into line at 5:30 and 6 in the morning, and we didn't open until 10 on weekdays. On the weekends they were lining up at midnight! I would spend all my vacation time from the exhibits in the archives in Leningrad. We would spend four or five months per city, then the exhibit finally got to Leningrad. Starting 7 to midnight I'd be in the archives, and then on my days off too. I was burning the candle at both ends because I also had an active social life.

On his career at UVM:

When I got here I managed several publications on Catherine the Great. In this department it's not at all surprising, but I noticed that Catherine peppered her writings with an awful lot of Russian proverbs. So I undertook a study of her use of proverbs, which essentially got me interested in the larger question of proverbs in Russian literature. I have the number one authority on proverbs just down the hall from me (Wolfgang Meider). He's been an incredible resource and to a very large degree responsible for this line of research, which I still have not tired of. In fact, the book I'm working on right now is the role of the Russian proverb in Solzhenitzyn's fiction.

Another research track is something that began with my work in the Foreign Service, observations I made about propaganda. I had long noticed that the Soviet visitors always seemed to be posing the very same questions to me, about life in the United States, crime, education, blacks, American Indians, etc. It finally dawned on me, or I developed a thesis, that the lead editorial on the front page of Pravda had anti-Western, more specifically anti-American content, and that there was a direct correlation between these lead editorials and the political cartoon that accompanied them and the views and information that Soviet citizens held about the quality and status of everyday American life in the United States. And so I began what became an incredibly long period of research. I read every single issue of Pravda from 1917 to 1991, most of them twice. It became my book All the Views Fit to Print.

During my career at UVM, I've primarily taught language, literature, and culture and civilization courses. I taught a lot of Soviet press courses, survey courses on 19th and 20th century Russian literature, and courses on single authors or single works. I also developed an innovative course called "Comparative Russian and American Civilizations." In those times (1980s), when there was so much of the Hertz-Avis complex between the United States and the Soviet Union, the audience for that class was considerably larger than it would be today. In the 1990s, I developed a course on business Russian and a team-taught course in the business school on the culture of doing business in Russia today.

On the ups and downs of directing the Area and International Studies Program:

Easily the richest aspect of the job would be the people I've worked with. People like Peter Seybolt, Bill Daniels, Bill Metcalfe, Ted Miles. Working closely for ten years with Nancy Poulin. And then I could not have been more fortunate to have closed my years as A&ISP Director with Mary Lou Shea.

Other high points include watching various area groups grow. Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, European Studies, the African studies minor, all took off in the mid-to-late '90s. It was enjoyable to be working with a director who was a go-getter, who really in just a few years could transform a program. One of our bigger moments was the change surrounding our name as the Center for Area Studies. The ethos of the times was indicating more international. We spent a year to a year and a half to get it renamed Area and International Studies.

Occasionally a high point, but occasionally a low point, was to coalesce with international groups in other UVM colleges and schools, such as Business, Agriculture, and Education. As a continuation of working effectively with these programs, the International Advisory Council was formed. The IAC was an attempt--largely successful for a while--to better coordinate disparate international activities on campus. The peak of our success in the IAC was when we developed proposals for the capital fund campaign to support international education on campus. I was the chair of IAC and director of AIS at the same time, so I could bring a lot of common synergy. I would say that would also count for the lowest of the lows. An unnamed functionary who sat in an administrative office basically closed down the IAC, closed it down the very year we were up for donors contributing money to the capital campaign. It's been frustrating to watch how little we've progressed from that point. Sadly. But by no means would I want to end my comments on that low note, because the overall experience of working with so many fine colleagues dedicated to international research and education has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have had over the years at UVM.

The complicity of the legal profession will be the subject of the fifth Miller Symposium, "The Law in Nazi Germany," on April 19 from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Livak Ballroom of the Davis Center.

"Until now the role that the legal profession played in Nazi Germany — creating, consolidating and maintaining the dictatorship — has not been sufficiently appreciated by researchers in the field," says Steinweis.

How did German lawyers enable the deprivation of human rights, the theft of property, and mass murder? How did German courts help to institutionalize racist laws? How did Jewish lawyers try to resist their exclusion from the German legal system? Were German jurists held accountable for their conduct after the demise of the Third Reich?

At this event, several distinguished scholars from the United States and Germany will address such questions that are central to understanding the part lawyers and judges played in the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust.

The symposium, sponsored by the Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies at UVM, is internationally recognized as a prestigious and significant venue for the presentation of scholarship about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The symposium is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.

More information and a detailed schedule can be found on the Center for Holocaust Studies website.

In advance of the symposium there will be a screening of the film Judgment at Nuremberg on Thursday, April 16, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. in 108 Terrill Hall. Francis Nicosia, Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Sudies, will lead a discussion after the film.

Lined up at the stoplights, bikes often outnumber cars on Joe Bowman's five-mile commute to work from his London apartment. Bowman, UVM Class of 2001, is among the two-wheeled converts on the street, but he stands out from the crowd on his Ultra Motor A2B, an electric bicycle that he not only rides but champions as a guiding force of the company that makes it.

The vagaries of an oil economy and advance of global warming are great change motivators, and Bowman believes Ultra Motor is well-positioned to be a player as the world looks for cleaner, more efficient ways to move. At age thirty-three, Bowman is president of the multi-million dollar, multi-national Ultra Motor enterprise. It's his latest venture in a wunderkind, globetrotting career rooted in a place where teenagers unafraid to dream big often start — in a friend's basement with a couple of guitars and amps.

From their subterranean beginnings, Bowman and his band mates in Somah quickly built a following in the New York area during the early nineties. Several albums and the inevitable van touring followed as they built a fan base in the jam band scene. (Looking back, Bowman describes Somah's music as Radiohead meets Phish — "lots of long guitar and Hammond organ solos.")

"Being involved in music early teaches you a lot of things," Bowman says. "Responsibility and discipline on the one hand, and it also lets you get all that young angst out of your system, so when you want to get serious you know the value of the education and how much the tuition costs."

Somah relocated to Burlington in 1995. Not long after, the band members began to go their separate ways and Bowman came to feel he'd had enough of the romance of "living in a van with four guys who don't smell very good." When he enrolled at UVM, Bowman had thoughts of working internationally and quickly found his way to the study of Russian language and culture. Nearly from his first day on campus, Professor Kevin McKenna would prove to be a key influence on Bowman's future direction.

"Joe always had the good, sound sense to realize that while he was especially fascinated by the Russian language and its culture, he still understood that he would have to ground his language interests in a sound, practical skill that would enable him to pursue a long career following his education at UVM," says McKenna. Together, they mapped out course schedules that mixed Russian language and literature with studies in economics, business administration, and accounting. McKenna adds that Bowman quickly "distinguished himself in these programs as much as he had done so in our German and Russian Department."

Post-UVM, Bowman moved to Moscow where he initially worked with a private equity fund and became involved with investing in technology start-ups. Seeing the opportunity of venture capital in Russia, in 2003 Bowman and two partners established the first venture capital firm in the country. The start-ups they would back included Ultra Motor, a two-wheeler powered with a hyper-efficient motor developed by Russian Vasily Shkondin in the 1970s. Shkondin's motor produces 35 percent more torque from the same amount of power, key to Ultra Motor's line of affordable electric scooters.

Bowman stepped in as CEO of Ultra Motor during a management crisis in 2006 and remained in the role until this year. Under his leadership, the company has grown to more than three hundred employees and topped $30 million in revenues last year. In March, Bowman transitioned to president of the company, responsible for product and technology development, the European market, and strategic planning.

"The best companies are built on really simple ideas," Bowman says. "Ultra Motor recognized an opportunity based on a basic idea." That thought, to paraphrase Bowman, is this: spiking energy costs and rising awareness of climate change are creating a global shift in transportation. The car is no longer the one-stop shop.

Ultra Motor quickly sold more than 25,000 bikes in India. China is projected as another major potential market, and the company released their first bikes in the United States last year, opening 300 points of distribution in five months.

In Europe, Bowman has worked with cities to incorporate Ultra Motor bikes into innovative electric bicycle and car sharing programs. Though those projects are on hold due to the global recession, Bowman is hopeful they can return to those initiatives as the economic picture brightens. Ultra Motor's primary focus these days is the company's product business, which has Bowman busy preparing to enter new markets in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands in the next six weeks.

Bowman has proven himself to be a savvy businessman, and in Ultra Motor he's selling a product that seems bound to make money and make a difference for the planet. He says, "As an educated adult who happened to get into the green tech industry, I find it's very natural and very rational behavior as both an entrepreneur and as a consumer to look at where the world is going and say, 'This has got to stop.'"

Editor's Note:

This article originally appeared in the winter 2009 issue of Vermont Quarterly Magazine. The full issue is available on-line at alumni.uvm.edu/vq. Print copies may be requested from University Communications, (802) 656-2005, or via e-mail, tweaver@uvm.edu.

On his sixty-fifth birthday, Professor Wolfgang Mieder's friends and fellow faculty surprised him with a Tuesday afternoon event that was both professional tribute to one of the world's leading folklore and proverb scholars and personal celebration of a man who has been a warm, collegial presence on the UVM campus for nearly forty years.

Mieder was feted in Memorial Lounge, where President Daniel Mark Fogel presented him with a book produced in his honor, The Proverbial "Pied Piper," a festschrift edited by Professor Kevin McKenna and published by Peter Lang.

In an interview last week, McKenna explained that the festschrift is a tradition of the academy, a celebratory book reserved for only top veteran scholars. Self-confessed instigator of a year-long web of white lies designed to keep the project a secret, McKenna drove the Mieder collection from start to finish.

"Wolfgang is no dummy," McKenna said, describing the challenge he knew he'd face in pulling off the surprise. When he ran the idea by Barbara Mieder, Wolfgang's wife, she told him the couple had vowed 30 years ago never to subject one another to a surprise party, but she agreed to look the other way. She wasn't planning the event; technically, her hands were clean.

McKenna swore the volume's twenty-three contributors, many of them on the UVM faculty, to secrecy. He juggled schedules to make sure Mieder, President Fogel, Provost Hughes and other key players would all be in town on Feb. 17. He even concocted the ruse of his own lecture on "The Role of the Russian Proverb in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Fictional and Publistic Works" to lure Mieder into Memorial Lounge at 4 p.m. on Tuesday.

Mieder thought he was there to introduce McKenna's talk. But as he launched into his comments, McKenna stepped up and revealed the day's true intent. The doors of Memorial Lounge swung open and special guests led by President Fogel and Rachel Kahn Fogel streamed into the room.

McKenna suspected (and worried) that the surprise would have a strong emotional impact on Mieder, a sentimental man. Though he pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes, the professor handled the moment with good humor. Following tributes from a number of colleagues, Mieder took the microphone. "Would you like me to give my introduction for Kevin now?" he quipped. Mieder then thanked those who had made the day and paid tribute back to those who honored him. "When you work someplace you want to be, it makes you a happy trooper," he said. "UVM is a damn good place to dedicate a life to."

Mieder called the festschrift "one of the joys in the academic tradition. For a little professor like me, it is about the ultimate thing."

The Mieder festschrift drew contributions from scholars in Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, Israel and the United States. Though most of the essays are in English, there are also pieces in French, German, Spanish and Russian. As McKenna writes in the collection's preface, the essays "treat a vast number of folklore and proverb themes, ranging from puns and anti-proverbs to urban legends revolving around the zipper; from a paremiological study of the treatment of racism in an American novel to graphic proverb depictions in a set of seventeenth-century playing cards."

In making the volume possible, McKenna cites the support of the president and provost's office; Joan and Eugene Kalkin; Jerold Jacobson and Gertrude Holle-Suppa Jacobson; Douglas Smith and Stephanie Ellis-Smith; and the Knight Vision Foundation.

In addition to McKenna, UVM faculty contributing essays to the book include Rob Gordon, Dennis Mahoney, Helga Schreckenberger, Juan Maura, Antonello Borra, and Adriana Borra.

In his essay, "A Few Remarks on Piedmontese Proverbs," Antonello Borra, associate professor of Romance Languages, delves into well-known proverbs in his home region of Italy. Lamenting that the clandestine nature of the project means he can't seek advice from the master, Borra soldiers on with a piece focused on proverbs about friendship, study, teaching, and work — all themes that resonate with the life of Wolfgang Mieder.

In his research, Borra happened upon one particular nugget of wisdom that he felt captured the spirit of unflagging curiosity that has driven UVM's "proverbial pied piper" to write some 150 books, more than 300 articles, and influence thousands of students.

As they say in northern Italy's Piedmont:

Tut ij mèis a fà la lun-a e tut ij di as n'ampara un-a.

Every month there is a new moon and every day one learns something new.

Hilberg was presented with "Das grosse Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik Deutschland," or the "Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany." The award, one of Germany's most prestigious honors, recognizes Hilberg's role as an historian and scholar of the Holocaust.

Dr. P. Christian Hauswedell, Consul General to the United States of the Federal Republic of Germany, presented the award to Hilberg on behalf of German Federal President Johannes Rau. The Consul General also donated to UVM's Center for Holocaust Studies 50 German language books, videos and other printed material on the Holocaust, German-Jewish relations, literary memoirs of German Jewish writers and texts about the rebirth of the Jewish community in contemporary Germany.

Hilberg, who taught at UVM from 1956-91 and initiated Holocaust Studies at the university, is the author of "Destruction of the European Jews," (1961) a book regarded as one of the authoritative books on the Holocaust.

In ?Discussing Proverbs and Proverbial Wisdom with Milton (Vermont) Fourth-Graders,? Mieder and Deborah Holmes, a fourth-grade teacher at Milton Elementary School, discuss their project to incorporate the values inherent in 150 proverbs into Milton fourth-graders? studies of Greek mythology, social studies, art, science and math.

The program, which features interviews with the students, has been airing nationally on NPR affiliates for several weeks as part of the ?Humankind? series. Vermont Public Radio will broadcast the program on Sunday, Feb. 17, at 7 p.m., on 107.9FM.

Mieder and Holmes co-authored a book, ?Children and Proverbs Speak the Truth,? that chronicles the project they conducted in 2000. The book, complete with illustrations, shows the amusing and insightful ways students incorporated the meanings of proverbs into their own lives.