The Fulbright Program, run by the U.S. Department of State since 1946, promotes cross-cultural understanding through international student and scholar exchanges. Fulbright Fellowship awardees have the opportunity to immerse themselves in other cultural realities as students, and to undertake research at the highest levels as scholars. They are often the recipients of other prestigious awards, including Nobel Prizes, high-level recognition from national governments, Pulitzer Prizes and MacArthur Fellowships. Since 1981, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded MacArthur Fellowships, also known as “Genius Grants”, to scholars who are contributing substantially to their fields of study. The following list recognizes five distinguished women scholars who have been both MacArthur and Fulbright Scholars and who have made unique contributions to knowledge about the history and culture of Latin America and/or the U.S. Hispanic/Latino community.
Heather Lechtman
Heather Lechtman is a Materials Scientist and Archaeologist with a B.A. from Vassar College (1956) and an M.A. and Diploma in Art and Archaeological Conservation from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts (1966). She has dedicated her 35-year professional life to researching the ancient systems of technology of the Andean people. Her primary contribution has been to demonstrate the complexity of the pre-Hispanic metallurgy that flourished in the Andean region, and its’ unique nature. Her fieldwork and laboratory analyses have shown that this metallurgy is different from that of other early societies in Western Asia, Europe and Africa. Indeed, her research has demonstrated that the Andean region was a “heartland of metallurgy” in the ancient world. Most recently, she has also researched differences in ancient extractive metallurgical practices within the Andean Region (comparing the Central Andes with the South-Central Andes). Prof. Lechtman was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984, and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Chile in 1987. She is also a Dumbarton Oaks Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been a Professor of Archaeology and Ancient Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1974, where she has also headed the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE).
Ruth Behar
Ruth Behar is a cultural anthropologist who was born in Cuba, was raised in New York, and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. She holds a B.A. degree from Wesleyan University (1977), and M.A. and PhD degrees from Princeton University (1980 and 1983). Her family background and professional experiences have led her to focus on themes of memory, identity and emigration. She has written extensively about women’s lives, folk religion, migration, diaspora and the Sephardic and Jewish communities in Cuba, Mexico and Spain, using methods that rely on historical and current personal narratives and life histories. In addition to her academic work, which includes reflections on feminist ethnography, Behar has written memoirs, bilingual poetry books and novels which explore the meaning of home and the depth of human experience in a global, ever-shifting world. Her novel Letters from Cuba received an International Latino Book Award and was inspired by her grandmother’s efforts to save her Polish Jewish family; her middle-grades novel Across so Many Seas is a Newbery Honor Book, among other awards.
She was the first Latina to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, in 1988. In addition, she was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Argentina in 2006, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, been named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, where she is also affiliated with Women’s Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies programs.
Anna Roosevelt
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, the great-granddaughter of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, was inspired to become an archaeologist during her childhood, when she visited archaeological sites in Arizona and New Mexico. She obtained a B.A. degree from Stanford University in 1968, and M.A. and PhD degrees in Anthropology from Columbia University (1974 and 1977). She has dedicated her professional career to studying human ecology and evolution, engaging in extensive field research in tropical South America and Africa. She is considered a prominent expert on Amazonian archaeology; her excavations have contributed significantly to our knowledge about early hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest, and the overall history of human-environment interaction in the Americas. Indeed, her research on prehistoric communities in the Orinoco Basin and at archaeological sites in the Brazilian state of Pará have led to a reinterpretation of how humans occupied the Amazon basin. Her research on the pre-Hispanic Marajoara culture during the 1980s led her to conclude that this society was far more developed than had been previously thought, and was “one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements” of the region. In the early 1990s, her excavations at the Painted Rock Cave with local Pará researchers found evidence that the paintings there are 13,000 years old, among the oldest art in the Americas.
Prof. Roosevelt was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988, and was a Fulbright U.S. Specialist to Brazil in 2007. She has also been awarded the Society of Women Geographers’ Gold Medal, Brazil’s Order of Rio Branco Medal, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a curator at the Museum of the American Indian, the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Since 1994, Roosevelt has been a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC).
Nora England
Nora England was captivated by the field of linguistics during her B.A. studies at Bryn Mawr College; she went on to obtain an MA and a PhD in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Florida (1971 and 1975, respectively). During this time, she was invited to join a project in Guatemala that aimed to study Maya languages and also to train indigenous Maya speakers in the field of linguistics so that they could be empowered to study and preserve their own languages. This became England’s lifelong passion: she co-founded OKMA in 1990, an academy in Guatemala dedicated to teaching and research on Maya languages, published several seminal works on Maya languages and linguistics, and trained more than 100 indigenous Maya linguists, who are “among the first generation of Maya who have had any significant post-high school education” (MacArthur Foundation profile). She was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Guatemala in 1989, obtained a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993, was a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, and was named a Messenger of Peace by the Guatemalan government in 2019.
She was a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas Austin for nearly 21 years, where she also founded the Center for Indigenous Languages of Latin America. In a tribute written after her death in 2022, she is credited with playing a central role in creating an entire cadre of native-speaker Maya linguists, and with revitalizing Mayan ethnic knowledge and pride overall. She was considered a “mamá académica” by her Indigenous students at UT Austin, who felt, in the words of one Maya Tzotzil student, inspired and included by her “faith in a diversity of voices in linguistics from Latin America”.
Martha Gonzalez
Martha Gonzalez is a unique “artivista”, a combined musician, artist, feminist theorist and activist, who has dedicated her life and career to promoting collaborative artistic expression, or convivencia, within and across communities. She defines convivencia as “participatory art, music and dialogue around shared social values” (MacArthur Foundation profile), and she has practiced this musical dialogue between L.A.-based Chicano artists and traditional son jarocho and fandango musicians in Veracruz, Mexico, as well as between a wide range of musical traditions, including Japanese American Buddhist dancers and African-American artists influenced by West African drummers. She is the lead singer, songwriter and percussionist for the Grammy-award winning musical ensemble Quetzal, which is based on son jarocho and zapateado. As a scholar and activist, she has contributed to the creation of Fandango Sin Fronteras and Entre Mujeres, transnational projects that connect communities in the U.S. and Veracruz through performances, publications and collaborative compositions. She has also published extensively on collective musical experiences, arguing that these promote inquiry, dialogue and social empowerment, and taught collective songwriting workshops in schools and jails.
A native of California, Gonzalez attended Pasadena City College, from which she transferred to UCLA to obtain a B.A. in Ethnomusicology in 1999, followed by a PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2013. She was a Fulbright-Garcia Robles U.S. Student to Mexico in 2007, and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022. She has also received a Ford Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She is currently Associate Professor of Chicanx-Latinx Studies and Director of the Scripps Humanities Institute at Scripps College in Claremont, California.
Sources:
Heather Nan Lechtman - MacArthur Foundation
Heather Nan Lechtman | American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Ruth Behar | U-M LSA Anthropology
Ruth Behar - MacArthur Foundation
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt - MacArthur Foundation
Roosevelt, Anna Curtenius | Anthropology | University of Illinois Chicago
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt - Wikipedia
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt: The rainforest archaeologist : Revista Pesquisa Fapesp
Nora C. England - MacArthur Foundation
In Memoriam: Nora C. England, Visionary Linguist and Mentor
Martha Gonzalez - MacArthur Foundation
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