Published: May 15, 2005

Chile, Azerbaijan and Germany are among the destinations where four new faculty Fulbright Scholars and Fellows from the University of Colorado at Boulder will teach and conduct research in 2005 and 2006.

Professor Thomas Riis, Associate Professor Jeff Frykholm and instructors Anne Bliss and Doug Cosper have been named Fulbright winners from CU-Boulder. The faculty grants are announced at different times through the year and a complete list of CU-Boulder faculty Fulbrights will become available in the fall.

Riis is the College of Music's Joseph Negler Professor of Musicology and director of the American Music Research Center. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar, he will be teaching in Lueneburg, Germany. Riis is a specialist in musical theater and writes and lectures widely on many topics in 19th- and 20th-century American music. His other interests include medieval song and historical performance practice, and he remains active as a conductor, choral singer, viol player and cellist.

Frykholm, associate professor of education, and Bliss, senior instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, both received Fulbright Fellowships to Chile for unrelated work. According to Fulbright officials, it is rare for two faculty members from the same university to receive Fulbright awards to the same host country.

At CU-Boulder, Frykholm works with current and future mathematics teachers at the elementary and middle school levels. In early 2006, he will travel to the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile, where he plans to develop a series of courses for public school math teachers to provide both math content and ideas for innovative instruction. Frykholm also will study the knowledge and educational styles of Chilean math teachers in the program, compare them with American methods, and look at ways to improve math teaching and learning in Chile.

Bliss received her master's and doctoral degrees from CU-Boulder and is a senior instructor in the university's Program for Writing and Rhetoric. She also serves as the program's coordinator for second language services and teaches online classes for Continuing Education.

Her Fulbright Fellowship is for work at three universities in Chile: Universidad Arturo Prat, Universidad de Atacama and Universidad Catolica de Maule. The government of Chile has mandated that citizens be bilingual within one generation. Bliss will be developing assessment programs for bilingual education, setting up online distance-learning programs and working with teachers and teacher instructors on applied methods for teaching English.

Cosper, a part-time instructor at the CU-Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will use his Fulbright Scholar grant to teach journalism skills at private universities in Azerbaijan during the fall semester. Khazar University in the capital city of Baku is one of Cosper's host universities.

Cosper has been training journalists and journalism students in developing countries for two years, including in Romania, Moldova, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. He recently finished working on a project training 13 West Bank journalists for six weeks in Boulder and Washington, D.C.

The Fulbright Scholar Program is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. Established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the program's purpose is to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries. Grant recipients are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement and because they have demonstrated extraordinary leadership potential in their fields.

For more information on the Fulbright Scholar Program visit .