Welcome to the March 2025 Round Up of the Fulbright REVIEW Blog
Hello Fulbright College friends, supporters, families, faculty, staff, alumni, and students,
Welcome to one of the best times of the year at Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences – our gorgeous spring.
The cherry blossoms will bloom soon, and next week our hard-working students, staff and faculty will enjoy a well-earned Spring Break.
Spring is a time of transition, growth and new beginnings and that seems especially apt timing for Fulbright College, which is currently thriving while also planning and heading toward a successful future.
This month we initiated the discovery phase of our strategic plan, with our external partner, the Art & Science Group. They are helping us conduct focus groups with more than 250 of our students, staff and faculty.
We’ve had important conversations about the incredible impact of our degrees, the meaning of our university’s land grant mission, and how we’ll continue to lead with strength as we move into the next decade.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the college’s future, too. Feel free to reach out at fulbright@uark.edu.
March is Women’s History Month, and in this edition of the Fulbright REVIEW we’re proud to recognize and honor the extraordinary women of Fulbright College.
Read on to meet some of them and learn more about all the incredible things happening here this month and beyond.
To kick things off, get to know 17 of our amazing student, faculty and alumni artists from School of Art, Creative Writing and Translation, and Theatre who were selected to be in the final cohort of the Artists 360 program.
Then meet a physicist named to the National Academy of Inventor’s 2025 class of senior fellows, along with eight outstanding students selected as semi-finalists for the Fulbright U.S. Student Scholarship Program.
You can also check out this video exploring our Master of Music degree in Black sacred music – the only one of its kind in the U.S. – and learn how our students are achieving remarkable success in historically challenging introductory chemistry and math courses.
After that, help us celebrate the 85th anniversary of Social Work at the U of A and see how we recently commemorated the 100th anniversary of the historic Scopes Trial.
On the event front, we just completed the successful SHE: Music Festival and the 2025 UARK Jazz Festival is right around the corner.
Additionally, we’re participating in the National Humanities Center’s upcoming “Being Human Festival” and will be celebrating World Anthropology Day soon.
Our Pryor Center also released a new episode of its popular Arkansas Archive Podcast, we entered into a new partnership to help strengthen Arkansas’ data science workforce, and our faculty continue to make the Elsevier/Stanford list of top researchers.
In other great research news, one of our anthropologists received a grant to study the evolution and spread of plague, and one of our French instructors received a grant for an impressive translation project.
Another of our researchers is working to uncover the mystery of Mars’ red coloring, while the head of our Arabic program released a new book on the tradition of oral poetry.
Two of our communication alumni also won awards for an installation they created for the Bentonville Film Festival, while another young journalism and political science alumnus returned to campus to help students learn about media literacy.
Meanwhile, a criminology major revealed the prep that goes into getting ready for law school, and the students in this unique class interviewed influencers and content creators to gain writing experience.
Finally, we recently paid tribute to a beloved music educator and conductor who left us too soon, after dedicating more than 37 years to the U of A and touching the lives of thousands of students.
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, I’m spending more and more time on the Razorback Greenway, enjoyed some spectacular performing arts shows with my family, and am making plans to go camping soon. But first – Spring Break. I hope all enjoy as we then gear up to end the semester strong.
As always, my team and I would love to hear from you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out or share your thoughts via fulbright@uark.edu.
Sincerely,
Brian E. Raines
Dean, Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences