Alumni Events – Thanksgiving and Fulbright Forest
Fulbright Iceland
The Fulbright Iceland Alumni Association (FFSÍ) held two events in the fall. For the second year in a row a large group of alumni and newly arrived U.S. grantees gathered for planting trees in the Fulbright Forest in Heiðmörk, just outside of Reykjavik early in September. This time around 485 trees were planted, in addition to the 560 planted the previous year. FFSÍ is making good progress on planting trees for each grantee.
In November FFSÍ celebrated Thanksgiving with their annual fundraising dinner. The event was well attended by alumni, current U.S. grantees, Americans living in Iceland and others hungry for a traditional Thanksgiving feast. Honorary speaker of the evening was Margrét Jónsdóttir Njarðvík, Rector of Bifröst University. Adam Bentley, Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy Reykjavik, served as master of ceremonies. As usual, the alumni raffle with a variety of exciting prizes and the annual pub quiz were big hits.
Grantee and Alumni News
- Meg Matich (Fulbright–Ministry of Education fellow 2016-2017) has been selected for a prestigious 2024 Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, to translate the Greenlandic novel The Valley of the Flowers by Niviaq Korneliussen from Danish into English. This is the first translation of a Greenlandic novel to receive the NEA translation grant. Recently, Meg’s translation of Ásta Sigurðardóttir’s short story collection Nothing to be Rescued was published by Nordisk Books in the UK.
- Be on the lookout for the Boston Globe on February 4. Recent Fulbright Iceland alumnus Gregory Harris (Ministry for Foreign Affairs Arctic grant) will have a story published on Ocean Cluster, which he first visited at a grantee enrichment event last fall.
- In December Reuters reported on a new study, led by astronomer Guðmundur Kári Stefánsson (Fulbright fellow 2013-2014), currently NASA Sagan Fellow at Princeton University, which challenges current theories about how planets form around the lowest mass stars.
- Historian Jón Kristinn Einarsson (Fulbright fellow 2021-2022) hosted the radio series Skaftáreldar, on the historic 1783 eruption, on the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. The complete series is available to stream on the RÚV website.