Leder, DeSoto receive Fulbright Grants

SAN MARCOS—Priscilla Vance Leder, a professor in the Department of English, and William Henry DeSoto, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas State University-San Marcos, have received Fulbright Scholar grants to lecture abroad.

The Fulbright grant will take Leder to the Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve in Belgium from Jan.-June 2006. Leder will lecture in American Literature and Culture.

DeSoto will lecture in Local Government and Political Science at the Slovak Agricultureal University , Nitra in the Slovak Republic . His lectureship began in Sept. 2005 and runs until Jan. 2006.

The pair are among approximately 850 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad to some 150 countries this academic year through the Fulbright Scholar Program. Established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the program's purpose is to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries.

The Fulbright program, America's flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 59 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have studied, taught or done research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the United States.

Award recipients are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement and because of demonstrated leadership potential in their fields.