UMaine Graduate Student Receives Fulbright for History Study in Canada

Contact: Shannon Risk, 845-661-9130; George Manlove, 581-3756

ORONO — UMaine Ph.D. candidate Shannon Risk has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Scholarship to study cultural and intellectual history in Canada for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Researching at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Risk will assess the women’s suffrage movements in New Brunswick and Maine.

She intends to examine in her dissertation how citizenship and the rights of citizenship were perceived in rural Maine and New Brunswick during the suffrage movement, and how those ideas play out in the 20th century.

“This project is significant in that it counters the assumption that progressive ideas only flow from urban areas, and it studies women’s political behavior across a national border in an academic field that has neglected this topic,” says Risk, a native of Independence, Iowa who now lives in Milford. “It shows the strategies of a disfranchised group to pressure the male political system, in many respects, by creating its own political power structure.”

Risk holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, and a master’s in American history from UMaine. She intends to receive her doctorate in history, with a minor in women’s studies, in the spring of 2009. Since earning her master’s degree in 1996, Risk spent nine years working in museums, including the Susan B. Anthony House National Historic Landmark in Rochester, N.Y. and the Putnam County Historical Society and Foundry School Museum in Cold Spring, N.Y. She previously served an internship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Canadian Fulbrights are competitive. Risk, whose adviser is Marli Weiner, professor of history, is only the eighth UMaine graduate student to receive one since 1992.

The Fulbright Program, America’s flagship international educational exchange program, is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the program has benefited some 108,160 Americans who have studied, taught or researched abroad and 178,340 students, scholars or teachers from other countries who have engaged in similar activities in the United States. The program operates in more than 155 countries worldwide.