8/15/12 – Riverdale, NY —Claire Nolte, Ph.D., professor of history at Manhattan College and a resident of Riverdale, N.Y., was accepted into the U.S. Fulbright Scholar program to research the transformation of Prague from a provincial German city into a major Czech metropolis. The author of The Sokol in the Czech Lands to 1914: Training for the Nation, Nolte is an expert in Eastern European history and has published widely in the field of Czech history.
She will work in the Prague City Archives in the spring of 2013 and examine the city of Prague starting in 1861, when the first Czech mayor of Prague was elected until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Nolte will demonstrate how Prague’s leaders changed the face of their city and paved the way for its role as the capital of Czechoslovakia.
“I am very honored to have received this award, which is very meaningful to me,” Nolte said. “It will allow me to write a book on a topic that interests me very much, and that has not been subjected to scholarly analysis. For this reason, my work will fill a gap in the historical literature.”
Nolte received Fulbright awards as a student, one for a year of study at the University of Munich in Germany, and a second to undertake research in Prague on her dissertation at Columbia University. In addition, she gave the 1992 orientation lecture for the Fulbright program in Czechoslovakia, and will give a lecture again at this year’s Fulbright orientation in Prague.
In addition to her work in Czech history, Nolte was also co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Sports and Ethnicity in the United States. She has contributed chapters to several collective works, among them European Culture in the Great War: The Arts Entertainment and Propaganda, Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe; Kafka, Prague and the First World War, and Different Paths to the Nation: Regional and National Identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830-1870. Her articles have appeared in such scholarly journals as, Nationalities Papers, Bohemia: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder, International Journal for the History of Sport and Austrian History Yearbook.
She is one of approximately 1,100 U.S. faculty and professionals (including two other Lasallians in the District of Eastern North America) who will travel abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program in 2012-2013. The U.S. government sponsors the Fulbright Program, which is its flagship international educational exchange program. In addition, the program is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.
First established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the program is also supported by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). Since the Fulbright program started more than 60 years ago, nearly 310,000 people have participated — approximately 116,900 from the United States and 192,800 from other countries.