Fulbrights awarded to pair of alumnae

Author: Adam Schaffer

Recent graduates Sarah Jones '07 and Lee Ware '06 joined four other Middlebury alumni as Fulbright scholars for the 2008-09 year.

The program, which is funded via grants from both the U.S. Department of State and foreign governments, was established in the late 1940s.

It's goal was to bring "a little more knowledge, a little more reason and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship," the program's namesake, the late Senator James William Fulbright, explained.

In living up to this ideal of bettering relations, Jones and Ware will both take their studies and mastery of Russian to the far reaches of world to study and improve intercultural dialogue.

Jones will be continuing the work on Russian Christian Orthodoxy she began in her senior thesis at Middlebury at the Russian State University of the Humanities and St. Andrew's Biblical Theological Institute. She is also currently pursuing a master's degree from the theological studies program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

The focus of her senior thesis - and current Fulbright work - was on Aleksandr Men, an influential Russian religious leader who supported the liberal reforms of the late 1980s, her advisor Associate Professor Tatiana Smorodinskaya explained in an email.

Jones admires Men "for teaching tolerance toward others, the necessity for ecumenical and interfaith dialogue, the responsibility for Christians to reach out to those in need and, most importantly, that a Christian's first duty is to love," she said in an interview with the College.

Jones has begun making contacts for her work as a Fulbright scholar, having already met with Men's widow and a number of his followers. In living up to the program's goal of promoting dialogue, she plans to launch a blog where young Muscovites can discuss Orthodoxy.

Ware's work will take her equally far - to Kazakhstan - where she will continue studying the integration of the Chechen population into Kazakh society.

She will be studying in the city of Almaty, which she describes as "the crossroads of the world ... a fantastic mix of Russian and Asian, Islam and atheism, East and West and old and new," she described in an interview with the College.

As she wrote in her Fulbright proposal, her work will analyze "the aspects of Kazakh culture that have been integrated into the Chechen community and what aspects have been preserved over the past 60 years."

In spite of a history of minority oppression within Russian society, "the Chechen population deported from Russia was welcomed by, and, in a sense, rescued by its Kazakh hosts."

Ware's advisor Professor Michael Kraus describes her research as "a very sensitive subject," but nevertheless is very confident in her success because of the strong connections she has already made in the Chechen community.

The graduates' studies at Middlebury - in and out of the classroom - built a foundation for their future studies. Both Ware and Jones were involved in the Russian and Eastern Europe Society, as well as other cultural and linguistic organizations. Ware was a political science and Russian double major. Jones graduated with high honors in Russian.

The Middlebury alumnae join the more than 108,000 Americans who have studied throughout the world on Fulbright awards in the program's 62-year history.