Sarah Christensen is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She previously received an MPhil in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic from the University of Cambridge and a BA in literary arts and classics from Brown University. Her research explores the emotional lives of enslaved women in the early Middle Ages (c. 500–1100), encompassing a broad geography from Iceland to the Islamic world. During her time as a Fulbright grantee, she will study textual and material evidence for the medieval trade in enslaved women along riverine routes through what is now Austria and beyond, seeking to understand emotional experiences of capture, transport, sale, labor, motherhood, friendship, and more. Sarah grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in California and has also lived in Puerto Rico, Mexico, London, New York City, Washington, DC, and Big Sky, Montana. She enjoys hiking, cycling, cross-country skiing, kayaking, and anything else that involves high mountains, snowy forests, or windswept islands.

Emily is a Musicology PhD candidate at Florida State University and an active musician. She will be conducting archival research on Karoline Pichler’s Viennese music salon to illuminate the important roles women played in Austrian musical and political culture during the early nineteenth century.

Bailey Fernandez earned a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research centers around 19th- and 20th-century German and Austrian art historical contexts, image theory broadly considered, computation and the arts (especially graphics and sound), and the intersection between the humanities and the analytical tradition in philosophy. He has a lifelong interest in the British poet and artist William Blake.

His project concerns interactions between three areas of inquiry. First, art historians have expressed interest in the “philosophy of action,” a branch of philosophy concerning agents' "intentions." Second, contemporary philosophers have become interested in German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's approach to action problems. Third, Hegel significantly influenced the Vienna School of Art History—art historians operating out of the University of Vienna in the later 19th and early 20th centuries—whose methodological conflicts in turn influenced art history's disciplinary foundations. In his interdisciplinary project, Bailey argues that the historical debates of the third can be made relevant to the first set of problems by means of the methodology developed in the second.

Bailey is also a passionate teacher of the humanities. As part of his Fulbright grant, he works as a US teaching assistant at the Mater Salvatoris AHS Gymnasium and Elementärpedagogik Bildungszentrum in Vienna's eighth district.

Emily Gallagher is a soprano who loves being both onstage and behind the curtain. She is a 2022–23 Fulbright community-based combined grantee to Austria, where she is working with the multi-media production company TaleSpin—Musical Tales for Big and Small to produce an original children’s opera and picture book during her grant period. The production and book will be presented in English, German, French, and Arabic to bridge international communities and generations through the arts. She will also be taking classes at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (mdw), and teaching at two secondary schools in Vienna.

She has been seen in roles such as Nada in Ana Sokolović’s Svada at the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade, Suor Genovieffa in Suor Angelica, Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, Carolina in Il matrimonio segreto, Adele in Die Fledermaus, and Maguelone/La Fée in Cendrillon. Emily is passionate about performing contemporary music and has also been a part of multiple world premieres.

Offstage, Emily is dedicated to technical theater and music education. She has experience as a stage manager for a wide range of theaters and has music and stage directed several children’s theater productions.

Emily is a member of the Pi Kappa Lambda and Phi Sigma Iota honor societies and is a member of Sigma Alpha Iota. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and holds a BFA in vocal performance.

Jesse Hudspeth was born and raised in Arvada, Colorado. He received his bachelor of science in chemistry with a concentration in biochemistry and a minor in philosophy from The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa (roll tide!) in December 2019. During his undergraduate studies, he worked under the direction of Dr. Martin G. Bakker to determine the critical micelle concentration of the surfactant Pluronic F127 in structural synthesis. He also worked on synthesizing various organometallic phthalocyanine complexes to act as catalytic frameworks in mesoporous carbon monoliths. In August 2020, he began his PhD in applied chemistry under the direction of Dr. Christine N. Morrison at the Colorado School of Mines, where he is investigating bacterial cysteine desulfurases as potential targets for novel antibacterial therapeutics to combat the antibiotic resistance crisis. For the 2022–23 Fulbright program year, he is working under the direction of Dr. Bernhard Rupp at the Medical University of Innsbruck with the assistance of Dr. Dirk Hoffmeister at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology to structurally characterize the phosphatidylserine decarboxylase responsible for the fist step in the biosynthesis of psilocybin in magic mushrooms, PsiD.

An experienced AmeriCorps VISTA alum with a commitment to public service and lifelong learning, Jeremy has a strong academic background, with a master of arts (MA) in history from Western Michigan University, a master of science in public policy & management (MSPPM) from Carnegie Mellon University, and a master of arts in German & European studies (MAGES) from Georgetown University. He wrote his MA thesis on the urban and environmental history of Vienna in the late nineteenth century, his MSPPM capstone was related to issues of urban food production and distribution, and his MAGES capstone was on the experience of Vienna during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918–20. He is currently enrolled as a doctoral candidate in history at Georgetown University, where he is researching the urban administration of Vienna during the challenges of the First World War. Jeremy hopes to utilize his understanding of urban governance both past and present to better shape urban spaces of the future.

Katja is a 2022–23 Fulbright combined grantee conducting research while participating in cultural exchange and assisting in the education of English-language learners at the secondary level. She is conducting her research project, "Curricular Call and Response: The Future of Music Education in Vienna," in affiliation with the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (mdw).

Her master’s thesis at Boston University, “Affirmation, Awareness, and Action: Curriculum for Social Justice and Music Education,” advanced her engagement with curriculum design and its importance in addressing current cultural influences in the lives of our students. Researching 21st-century curriculum development inspired her to investigate how we have begun addressing diversity in music education at different levels and encouraged the desire for further cross-cultural investigation.

Katja graduated summa cum laude with a master of music in music education and graduate certificate in arts management from Boston University, where she was awarded a School of Music Departmental Award for her work as a music education graduate assistant. She received her bachelor of music in music education from the University of New Hampshire as well as New Hampshire and Massachusetts state licensure in K–12 music education before gaining experience as an educator and working directly with music students at all levels of schooling.

Alice Lee is a PhD student in music history and theory at Stony Brook University. Her research lies mainly in opera in German-speaking lands during the long 19th century, with interdisciplinary focus on issues surrounding political and financial cultures. She is currently interested in the relationship between the market economy, opera houses, and singers as well as their intermediaries at the time. Alice double-majored in economics and music (BA degree) at Columbia University.

Under the guidance of Prof. Michael Walter of the University of Graz, Alice will conduct archival research, quantitative data analysis, and historical spatial analysis on Austrian opera houses and opera singers in Austria. Her project implements methods to scrutinize empirical strategies and monetary-related questions in historical developments of the art form. Through discerning long-run pervading trends or patterns, Alice is interested in uncovering the ways in which revenue and salary data can serve as temporal tracers of historical events and technological innovations. She aims to re-examine quantitative—especially financial—questions that  have been hitherto viewed more peripherally within music aesthetics.

Kian Shamskhou is a recent graduate with a biochemistry degree from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. Kian built a foundation in research by working in the Cannon lab, a synthetic organic chemistry group at Occidental College. He wrote his honors thesis on the work conducted in the Cannon lab, which focused on developing novel photocatalytic methods for bond formation.

Kian continues to advance the field of sustainable chemistry as a Fulbright student in Austria. As a member of the Schoefberger lab at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Kian works on the development of electrocatalytic methods for carbon dioxide reduction. Through this vein of chemistry, Kian hopes to make an impact on highly polluting industries by synthesizing value-added products from carbon dioxide.

William Andrews is an associate professor of management at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. His PhD from the University of Georgia is in business strategy, with his dissertation examining the performance changes in newly privatized companies. His master's degree is in international business from the Thunderbird School of Global Management—now part of Arizona State University—and he has held professional certifications in mergers and acquisitions, corporate financial management, and international trade compliance. His most recent publications include a book chapter proposing the Humanistic Organizational Development Matrix (2022), an application of Erikson's stages of psycho-social development to the modern organization, and case studies focused on strategic issues facing early-stage growth companies.

William is professionally active in the central Florida venture capital community and is a co-founder of the Hatter Angel Network, an alliance of early-stage investors. He is married with three grown children and three grandchildren. For fun, he is a triathlete and enjoys playing and writing songs for the guitar.

Fausto Sarmiento is a full professor of geography at the University of Georgia and an internationally recognized leader of montology who directs the Neotropical Montology Collaboratory. He looks into human-environment interactions informed by evidence of landscape transformation and dynamics of land cover/land use change, with critical biogeography, political ecology insights, historical documentation, neoecological field research and modeling for alternative scenarios of sustainability and regenerative development.

Working at the intersection of tropical mountain geographies, he contributes research at the forest transition and other active boundaries, such as the Andean treeline, Andean sustainable development, or the implication of biocultural heritage on Andean sacred sites and indigenous revival. By studying the role of human impacts in shaping the neotropical highlands, he is reconstructing ecological theory applicable to Andean farmscape transformation and Andean identity markers in the midst of global environmental change, developing new narratives of mountain sustainability as tropical environments are constructed, represented, claimed, and contested. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Belmont Forum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, the MacArthur Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the Scott Neotropic Fund, the Exposition Foundation, and other sources.

Chuixiang Yi is a professor at Queens College of the City University of New York. Previously, he was an associate professor at Beijing Normal University. Chuixiang holds a PhD in atmospheric sciences from Nanjing University and held post-doctoral positions in boundary-layer meteorology, micrometeorology, and biosphere-atmosphere interactions at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Colorado. His research has focused on canopy fluid mechanics, including developing theoretical formulations, designing observations, and performing numerical simulations to understand the physical, biological, and chemical processes that control the exchange of trace gas between vegetation and the atmosphere. Chuixiang was a leading recipient of the World Meteorological Organization's Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award in 2012. He was a Rossby fellow from the International Meteorological Institute at Stockholm University during 2014–15. Chuixiang is currently a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck. His lab has a broad spectrum of research projects across forest ecology, remote sensing, micrometeorology, climate change, paleoclimate, and hydrology. His team's overall goal is to use nonlinear system theory, stability analysis approach, resilience, and tipping-point concepts to predict potential critical transitions of nature and society in facing extremes induced by the warming climate.

Reece is a recent graduate from Western Washington University, where she graduated with a BS in energy science & technology with a minor in energy policy as well as a BS in German. She is excited to be a USTA in Linz, Austria, and hopes to continue doing energy-related research on the side. In Reece's free time, she enjoys cooking, being outdoors, snowboarding, and spending time with friends and family. She is also past-Rotaract president and plans on staying involved in the organization for as long as possible!

Katherine Decker is from Wellesley, Massachusetts, and just graduated from Denison University in Ohio with a bachelor's degree in psychology and German. She is so excited to be a US teaching assistant because she loves working in schools with children. Her career goal is to be a school psychologist, and she hope to gain valuable experience this year! Katherine has been learning German for 10 years and feels so lucky to be immersed in the language (which she has never been able to do thus far!) She loves to be outside, going on walks or runs, and she also loves to cross-country ski. She enjoys exploring new cuisines and foods, especially coffees from different countries. Katherine hopes to enjoy all of those things in Austria and Europe this year!

As a child growing up in Vancouver, Washington, Molly played sports and loved listening to music. In high school, she continued to play sports and was part of the leadership club. It was in track and field where she met ´her friend Rebekka, who was a German exchange student at her school. They grew close, and their friendship made Molly want to learn German.

At Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, Molly took German classes and declared herself a German major by the end of her first year. In her second year, Molly met international students who were at her university to learn English, and it was then that she discovered her love of sharing US culture and helping others learn and practice English. In March 2021, she graduated from WWU with a double major in German language and linguistics and a minor in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.)

The combination of her degrees led her to apply for the USTA program, and she is excited to finally get into the classroom and teach her students! In her free time, you can find Molly reading, going on hikes, and going to BTS concerts!

Enzo is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with degrees in international affairs, German, and the business of entertainment. He is passionate about history, music, film, and cultural exchange of all kinds.

Jonnie has experience in a wide range of fields, from drama and debate to gardening. They find themself just as at home mapping geologic formations in the Mojave Desert as they do behind a computer inputting data. If there's something they haven't done for employment, there's a high likelihood they've tried it in their free time. Jonnie loves trying new things, and they pride themself on their many hats, so to speak.

Haleigh Drew is a recent graduate of Boston University with majors in philosophy and linguistics. Initially from New Hampshire, Haleigh had limited exposure to foreign-language education growing up. In college, she wanted to further her understanding of English-language mechanics and also completed coursework in German and Spanish. Her interest in this Austrian program was ironically cultivated in 2018 while volunteering at a Gymnasium in Peine, Germany, for four months. After this experience, Haleigh was curious to learn more about Austria and to decide for herself which side of this age-old rivalry she was on! Haleigh is excited to be immersed in Austrian culture while helping students improve their English. In her free time, she enjoys running, true-crime podcasts, and drinking hot chocolate in any of Styria’s wonderful cafés."

Bailey Fernandez earned a BA from Hampshire College and an MA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research centers around 19th- and 20th-century German and Austrian art historical contexts, image theory broadly considered, computation and the arts (especially graphics and sound), and the intersection between the humanities and the analytical tradition in philosophy. He has a lifelong interest in the British poet and artist William Blake.

His project concerns interactions between three areas of inquiry. First, art historians have expressed interest in the “philosophy of action,” a branch of philosophy concerning agents' "intentions." Second, contemporary philosophers have become interested in German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's approach to action problems. Third, Hegel significantly influenced the Vienna School of Art History—art historians operating out of the University of Vienna in the later 19th and early 20th centuries—whose methodological conflicts in turn influenced art history's disciplinary foundations. In his interdisciplinary project, Bailey argues that the historical debates of the third can be made relevant to the first set of problems by means of the methodology developed in the second.

Bailey is also a passionate teacher of the humanities. As part of his Fulbright grant, he works as a US teaching assistant at the Mater Salvatoris AHS Gymnasium and Elementärpedagogik Bildungszentrum in Vienna's eighth district.

Emily Gallagher is a soprano who loves being both onstage and behind the curtain. She is a 2022–23 Fulbright community-based combined grantee to Austria, where she is working with the multi-media production company TaleSpin—Musical Tales for Big and Small to produce an original children’s opera and picture book during her grant period. The production and book will be presented in English, German, French, and Arabic to bridge international communities and generations through the arts. She will also be taking classes at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (mdw), and teaching at two secondary schools in Vienna.

She has been seen in roles such as Nada in Ana Sokolović’s Svada at the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade, Suor Genovieffa in Suor Angelica, Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, Carolina in Il matrimonio segreto, Adele in Die Fledermaus, and Maguelone/La Fée in Cendrillon. Emily is passionate about performing contemporary music and has also been a part of multiple world premieres.

Offstage, Emily is dedicated to technical theater and music education. She has experience as a stage manager for a wide range of theaters and has music and stage directed several children’s theater productions.

Emily is a member of the Pi Kappa Lambda and Phi Sigma Iota honor societies and is a member of Sigma Alpha Iota. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and holds a BFA in vocal performance.

Daisy is an emerging scholar focusing on German-speaking countries and the psychology of human rights abuses, politics, and legislation as well as on how to assist victims of large-scale and small-scale trauma, including war, mass shootings, and natural disasters. She completed her undergraduate thesis on various teams with politically extreme fan bases.

During her undergraduate studies, Daisy also worked at an international-relations think tank and published several pieces. She is most proud of her piece for the Pulitzer Center on assisted-dying legislation in the United Kingdom.

Currently, Daisy is on her second year serving as a US teaching assistant at two schools in Lower Austria. She sincerely enjoys her job, as it allows her to promote cultural exchange between the United States and Austria and enables her to help her students better their understanding of the English language. Daisy is also a master's student at the University of Vienna.

Thank you, Fulbright Austria, for the life-changing experience!

Marissa Justin a recent graduate with a bacherlor of arts in applied diplomacy as well as experience in the US Department of State’s Diplomat in Residence program. She maintained a high aptitude for accomplishments as a full-time student with commitments in part-time employment and volunteer work managing projects, events, general office operations, and customer interface. Her career aspirations in public service and her language skills in both German and Modern Standard Arabic will allow Marissa to apply her academic expertise, diverse work experience, and interpersonal skills in the field of diplomacy in the federal government.

Katja is a 2022–23 Fulbright combined grantee conducting research while participating in cultural exchange and assisting in the education of English-language learners at the secondary level. She is conducting her research project, "Curricular Call and Response: The Future of Music Education in Vienna," in affiliation with the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (mdw).

Her master’s thesis at Boston University, “Affirmation, Awareness, and Action: Curriculum for Social Justice and Music Education,” advanced her engagement with curriculum design and its importance in addressing current cultural influences in the lives of our students. Researching 21st-century curriculum development inspired her to investigate how we have begun addressing diversity in music education at different levels and encouraged the desire for further cross-cultural investigation.

Katja graduated summa cum laude with a master of music in music education and graduate certificate in arts management from Boston University, where she was awarded a School of Music Departmental Award for her work as a music education graduate assistant. She received her bachelor of music in music education from the University of New Hampshire as well as New Hampshire and Massachusetts state licensure in K–12 music education before gaining experience as an educator and working directly with music students at all levels of schooling.

Sawyer Moseley is a North Carolina native who studied international relations at American University in Washington, DC. He is strengthening his multicultural capabilities by working with Austrian students this year in the state of Carinthia. Sawyer intends to continue his education next year here in Austria by purusing a master's program in Vienna.

Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Bianca Navia is the oldest of four sisters in a Cuban-Italian-American family. She credits her early interest in history, politics, and culture to frequent trips to her local library, where she would check out mountains of books.

Bianca is a recent graduate of Arizona State University, earning dual degrees in political science and global studies and minors in German and Italian. Her academic interests include international affairs, migration, gender, Middle Eastern politics, and (counter)terrorism. She is also multilingual, speaking Spanish, German, Italian, and Arabic (Levantine dialect). Bianca’s passion for foreign languages motivated her to teach English. With six years of teaching experience, she has worked with students from around the world, from adult Syrian refugees to Palestinian high-school students.

In her undergraduate and postgraduate career, she has represented her identity as a proud Latina through several prestigious fellowship programs. She is a 2020 alumna of the PPIA Junior Summer Institute Fellowship Program at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, a 2019–20 Killam fellow to the University of Ottawa in Canada, a two-time Boren Scholar to Amman, Jordan, and a 2021 Dean's Medalist.

In the future, she aspires to earn a Master's and PhD, continue teaching English abroad, work in academia, and conduct research.

Maddie is a second-year US teaching assistant working at the University Teacher's College in Vienna (Paedagogische Hochschule Wien). She mostly works with undergraduate students to supplement their coursework on teaching English as a foreign language in Austrian schools through in-class activities and one-on-one meetings with students to improve their English language and teaching skills.

Maddie studied cognitive neuroscience and applied linguistics at Washington University in St. Louis and graduated in 2017. She is excited for her second year as a US teaching assistant in Austria.

Helen Poe graduated from Georgetown University in 2022 with a bachelor of arts in German and Russian. Her coursework at Georgetown emphasized German and Austrian literature from the interwar period as well as contemporary German and Eastern European women's literature. While enrolled at Georgetown, she worked as a research assistant at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, assisted professors with research and translation projects, and completed a senior honors thesis on the portrayal of domestic violence in contemporary Russian poetry and popular music. Helen also attended the Russian Graduate Program at Middlebury College in Summer 2021 and has previously led English-language public-speaking workshops in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Hannah Scholl is from outside of Boston in Medfield, Massachusetts. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2021 with a double major in German and politics, a minor in environmental studies, and high honors for her thesis, which analyzed the usability and accessibility of e-participation through state-level environmental-agency websites. Through Oberlin, Hannah worked as an America Reads tutor, an admissions senior fellow, politics research assistant, and German tutor and was a member of several choirs. She was also a student representative of Oberlin at the Athens Democracy Forum in association with the New York Times and was the chair of the Green EDGE Fund, a student board that finances and generates projects within the community that promote environmental sustainability. Passionate about pursuing a career in public policy, she has also interned for federal and state representatives and at a non-profit think tank in Boston and has also volunteered with numerous campaigns.

After falling in love with Austria and the town of Villach, Hannah is beyond excited for the opportunity to teach at her school for a second year and serve as the regional advisor for Carinthia to help guide new USTAs. She looks forward to continuing to deeply explore and immerse herself in the Austrian language and culture, develop a more international perspective, serve as a cultural ambassador from the US during a time of recent political turmoil, and watch her students grow in confidence and language skills.

Max was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, and grew up in northwest Indiana. He studied German and history at Hillsdale College. He is so lucky to have the opportunity to teach in Austria. His mother was born in Austria, so to have the chance to return and reconnect with her family is incredibly special for Max. You can find him wandering around museums or forests, building a LEGO set, lost in a book, song, podcast or video game, or enjoying a good meal. If you're reading this, thank you for taking an interest in his story, and he hopes you are doing well.