Welcome to the February 2025 Round Up of the Fulbright REVIEW Blog
Hello Fulbright College friends, supporters, families, faculty, staff, alumni, and students,
While the weather here in Fayetteville may be extra chilly right now, it’s still a great time to celebrate and share our Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences successes, top news, and events with you.
We’ve been busy so far this semester, with classroom, lab and studio work, yes, but also in synthesizing all we learned from fall’s listening tour into the beginnings of our new strategic plan.
We’re forming a steering committee to help guide the process of drafting a new vision for the college that will guide us for the next five to ten years. Their work will be informed by what we have learned, but I’d still love to hear your thoughts on the college’s future. Where do you hope to see Fulbright College in 10 years?
What was your experience like here, and what has your time with us helped you go on to achieve? What makes you proud to be a member of the Fulbright College family? What sets Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences apart from other large colleges of arts and sciences? What are our distinctive strengths and traditions that we should build upon?
Feel free to reach out at fulbright@uark.edu to let us know. We would love to hear from you.
February is also known as a month of good cheer and love, and as you explore this edition of the Fulbright REVIEW, we hope the uplifting stories inspire both in you.
To kick things off, meet a biology major learning medical skills while studying abroad, and help mark the band program’s 150th anniversary by enjoying some of its past members’ favorite memories.
We’ve got great research news to share – including a collaborative $500,000 grant for a unique digital humanities project, and new evidence demonstrating that human evolution is far more complex than originally thought.
You can meet the Emmy-award winning director of The Arkansas Accent Project, as well as an alumna whose commitment to justice helped her become the first Black woman on Oregon’s Supreme Court.
On the event front, we’ve been celebrating Black History Month all February long, just released a new spring arts and culture preview, and are welcoming back the alumnus who invented Murdle.
Additionally, we’re co-presenting an exhibit and gathering of contemporary Indigenous artists, and recently expanded fine arts access by offering free shuttles to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
In general U of A news, we garnered two new accolades – TIME named us a top college for future leaders for the second year in a row, and we climbed in the 2025 U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Online Programs” rankings.
Speaking of campus, we’re making big changes to a couple landmarks, too. The Multicultural Center received a significant facelift, and Mullins Library will soon be debuting new spaces, a café, and labs.
Our students have also been up to great things such as allocating $32,000 to local nonprofits as part of the Strategic Philanthropy Course, and continuing a winning streak in speech and debate competitions.
More than 3,000 of our students also recently made the Fall 2024 Chancellor’s and Dean’s Lists, some of our top academic honors, and several more students participated in STEM Posters at the AR Capitol.
Meanwhile, a history doctoral student has been helping to push the frontier of artificial intelligence, and our researchers hosted a group of planetary scientists to visit rock formations that are incredibly similar to those found on Mars.
You can also meet a political scientist who uses the fictional world of The Hunger Games to teach global trade dynamics, an archaeogeophysical researcher who is retiring after 39 years of service, and then learn more about a literacies project that awarded $162,905 in grant support.
Finally, help cheer on three of the newest U of A teaching Academy fellows and one finalist for the academy’s top award who all hail from Fulbright College, as well as the new editor of a prestigious national journal.
If you’d like to learn more about the extraordinary people, initiatives, projects and activities that make up Fulbright College, please visit our Facebook, Twitter / X, Instagram or LinkedIn social media channels. Our handle is @uarkfulbright on all.
We’ll also keep providing you with more new stories at fulbrightreview.uark.edu, so stay tuned.
On a personal note, the freezing weather has made it all the more enjoyable to take in the view from my Old Main office of ice-covered campus trees with a hot coffee from one of the many great places around town. So far, I’ve especially enjoyed brews from all the campus spots. Send me a note with your favorite suggestions to add.
As always, my team and I would love to hear your thoughts. Please don’t hesitate to reach out via fulbright@uark.edu.
Sincerely,
Brian E. Raines
Dean, Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences