LOIS ROTH ENDOWMENT

A glass sculptor from the Rhode Island School of Design, Matthew Perez, is currently using a Lois Roth Endowment grant to expand the scope of his Fulbright year at the Australian National University (ANU), where he has been working with Richard Whiteley, an internationally renowned artist and expert in casting glass. Matt traveled from Canberra to Melbourne and Sydney as a visiting artist to engage university audiences on his research project (“To Anneal”) on new techniques of glass fabrication. As an artist, Matt creates complex shapes to generate what he calls “shape induced stress.” He recently presented his technical findings in a formal lecture at ANU, soon to be published on www.glassaneal.com in multiple languages.

The LRE also partners with EKF on the Sozopol Seminar, an annual three-day event held in historic Sozopol, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. The seminar offers advanced discussions among writers of fiction in Bulgarian and English, under the guidance of established authors, in an atmosphere of collegial sharing and close interpersonal exchange. Participation has become increasingly competitive, with thirty applicants competing for each of this year’s ten places. This year’s fellows were Molly Antopol, Rayko Baychev, Petja Heinrich, Michal Hinken, Lee Romer Kaplan, Ivan Landzhev, Jane Martin, Paulina Petrova, Yana Punkina, and John Struloeff. Translation workshops were attended by leading publishers, translators and editors from Bulgaria, Great Britain, Ireland and the U.S. (See: www.ekf.bg)

The Roth-Thomson Award for 2010-11, which the LRE continues to administer in cooperation with the American Scandinavian Foundation, went to Maggie Taft, in support of her dissertation research on Making Danish Modern: Imaging Design, Imagining a Nation. Ms. Taft is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, where she is investigating the production, reception and distribution of design in Scandinavia and abroad from 1945 to 1960, to demonstrate how Danish furniture produced during these years both generated and accumulated cultural and social meanings that were mobilized in the context of Cold War politics.

Two Fulbrighters working in Finland also received Roth-Thomson awards for 2010-11. Both awards were for projects identified “post-arrival,” an approach structured by LRE to enable scholars to fine-tune their project plans once in the field. Lauren Holmes, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Yale, has a Fulbright grant to work on her dissertation Music and the Nation-State: Finnish Music from Nationalism to Post-nationalism, examining the government infrastructure that has supported the export of Finnish music since World War II. Ms. Holmes initiated an ambitious schedule of interviews with leading Finnish composers and Finnish musical organizations, and her LRE grant is funding her research travel outside of Helsinki.
Christian Benefiel received his MFA in sculpture from the University of Maryland, College Park, where a large-capacity foundry enabled him to refine his expertise in metal-casting processes. He then worked in North Carolina to develop the world’s first foundry powered by methane from landfill gas. Noting that “toxic and dangerous processes remain common for artists,” Mr. Benefiel went to Finland to research sustainable practices for artists at foundries. While teaching at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, he built a small sustainable foundry. His LRE award is enabling him to create a large-scale work in Pirkkala for that town’s permanent outdoor exhibition.

The 2010-11 recipient of the Robin and Avril Winks award was Divya Dhar, a young Indian-New Zealander Fulbright grantee, who had already received a number of national awards for her work as creator of the “P3 (Peace, Prosperity and Progress) Foundation,” an NGO that mobilizes young people from across the Asia Pacific region to break out of poverty. Ms. Dhar is using her Winks award support her study for a Master’s Degree in Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

For 2010-11, the LRE awarded its annual grant for Norway to a new graduate of Williams College, the second year in a row for a Williams graduate. Art history major Kristine Ericson is a Fulbrighter researching the influence of Japanese design on Sverre Fehn, Norway’s most influential late 20th century architect. Ms. Ericson studied how Fehn incorporated Japanese nature motifs into his designs. She was also lead designer for a studio project to create a “green path” linking the Norwegian University of Science and Technology campus. Her Roth grant is funding travel to two Fehn building sites in northern Norway, where she will develop proposals for sustainable rural living.

Last year, the National Peace Foundation’s chair Sarah Harder, From Moscow, reported that complications with the Russian sponsors slowed down the program. Since our grant last year could not be utilized, she returned our check. We look forward to the resumption of this fine project and to future cooperation with great interest.

The LRE works with Fulbright Sweden on “post-arrival” projects, to enable scholars to adjust their focus once in the field. For 2010-11, there were two awards: Andrew Bearnot is a double graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and Brown University (BS in Materials Engineering), whose Fulbright project involved the study of glass art and manufacture in early 20th century Sweden. He spent the fall at Linnaeus University, followed by an internship at the Swedish Glass Research Institute in Växjö, where he worked on SGRI’s “Color System” project. He used his LRE award to visit glassworks in Germany and the Ambiente-Frankfurt trade show, attended by glass producers from around the world. Anna Hersey was in Stockholm to study the Swedish art song repertoire and Swedish diction at the Swedish Royal College of Music and develop a conductor’s guide to promote interest in and knowledge of Swedish song. She used her LRE award to support a March 2011 trip to Chicago to present her findings to the American Choral Directors’ Association Conference in Chicago.

Erika Larsen

a 2009 LRE grantee for Sweden, just published an impressive piece of photo-journalism in National Geographic, concluding the project for which she received grants from both the Fulbright program and from the LRE.

The LRE’s Turkey project was launched following a gift from Myriam Hallock in memory of her late, Turkophile husband, Richard R. Hallock. In past years LRE grants supported by the Hallock gift have funded the travel of Turkish social scientists ( see above) to SUNY Binghamton and supported a program for Turkish students to attend a workshop on state government in Albany, NY. Over time LRE grants have helped to expand a growing exchange of students and scholars between SUNY and Turkey. During the past year, following the “Arab Spring,” the Endowment has begun exploring how to expand this project to the wider eastern Mediterranean region. Initial contacts with the Fulbright Commissions in both Egypt and Jordan have been encouraging.

The Lois Roth Endowment partners annually with the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF) in Sofia, Bulgaria, on the Dyankov Translation Prize and on the Sozopol Seminar Named for Krustan Dyankov, renowned translator of American literature into Bulgarian, the Dyankov prize was established in 2007. The America for Bulgaria Foundation added additional support in 2010, and the LRE agreed to sponsor the second prize. The 2010 Dyankov first prize went to Margarita Dogramadzhian for her translation of The White Tiger, Indian author Aravind Adiga’s 2008 debut and Man Booker Prize winning novel. Second prize went to Svetlana Komogorova-Komata for her translation of Shantaram, a semi-autobiographical novel by Australian author Gregory David Roberts (Orgon Publishers). LRE grants have also supported other literary programs in Bulgaria, such as the publication of Bulgaria’s first writing-craft school text. For more information on the EKF, see: www.ekf.bg/en/.

MLA-Roth awards are granted biennially. The next award will be presented at the January 2012 Modern Language Association conference in Seattle. The MLA-Roth award is the only translation prize given by MLA that does not specify country and language of origin. Encouraged by recent trends, the LRE would like to award more translations into English from non-European literatures, and move to an annual prize.

No prize for translation from Persian to English was awarded for 2010-11. The LRE looks forward to making an award in 2012.

The 2010 Coindreau Prize was awarded in December at a ceremony in Paris, to Laurence Viallet for her fine translation of Dominican author Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Press, Pulitzer 2008, published in France by Plon, Feux Croisés collection). The Coindreau jury required long deliberation and three votes to reach consensus, with one juror calling the work “a strange book, bursting with life, touched by madness and phantasmagoria.” The 2011 Prix Maurice Coindreau will be awarded in December to Jacques Mailhos for his translation of environmentalist Edward Abbey’s non-fiction Desert Solitaire.

No prize was awarded to teaching assistants in the Columbia University French Department for the 2010-11 academic year.

The 2010-11 Millon Award, dedicated to supporting the research residency of an Italian architectural historian at the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), went to Constanza Caraffa, head of the photo library at the Department of Art History in Florence, Italy.

The Lois Roth Endowment is pleased to be in partnership with the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) to recognize through annual awards, including cash prizes funded by the LRE, particularly meritorious contributions by Department employees to the cause of international cultural exchange. For 2010, the Lois Roth Award for a Foreign Service employee went to Caryn Danz, a 26-year cultural affairs veteran, currently ECA’s Branch Chief for Educational Information Resources. An honorable mention certificate went to Robert Greenan for his work as Cultural Affairs Officer in Baghdad. The corresponding 2010 Ilchman-Richardson Award for a Civil Service employee went to Patricia Ehrnman, currently liaison between ECA and the Department’s Bureau of African Affairs.
Ann Stock, standing in as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, and Ambassador J. Adam Ereli, acting Assistant Secretary for the ECA Bureau, co-hosted a ceremony at the Department with representatives of the Lois Roth Endowment, at which the 2010 awardees received their certificates and checks. 2009 Ilchman-Richardson winner, Marianne Craven, managing director of academic programs for ECA, belatedly received her certificate and check at that time, as well.
Starting in 2012, both the Lois Roth Award and the Ilchman-Richardson Award will be announced in conjunction with ECA’s annual events calendar and presented at the Bureau’s general awards ceremony in May.

Dear Friends,

At our Annual Meeting on December 3, 2010, I was honored to be elected the new Chairman of the Board of the Roth Endowment. It is a privilege for me to succeed the Endowment’s founder, Richard T. Arndt, in this position. As you know, our mission – to foster, enhance and deepen international cultural exchanges – was inspired by the life and work of Lois Wersba Roth and, since 1986, has been championed by her devoted spouse.

As the Endowment approaches its 25th anniversary, Dick and the other Board members join me in expressing our heartfelt gratitude for your commitment to our work. In my first act in office, I invite you to make a special gift in recognition of Dick’s splendid service since the creation of the Endowment. He has nurtured the Endowment as a true labor of love for all of these years and, thanks to his dedication and vision, our programs have flourished, making countless modest but meaningful contributions in an unwavering effort to improve mutual understanding across the globe.

The change in Board leadership will in no way diminish Dick’s involvement in the Endowment’s work. With the addition of staff to expand our reach and handle day-to-day operations, Dick will now be freed to devote his energy and enthusiasm to developing new programs and resources. All of us on the Board, especially the new Officers who are listed on the letterhead, are relying on his wise counsel in his role as Chairman Emeritus.

As someone who has spent her entire career in the not-for-profit sector, including at Johns Hopkins University and The Marrow Foundation, I am keenly aware of the challenges facing non-profit organizations in today’s world. Even though resources are limited, our aspirations know no bounds. Now, more than ever, we must count on friends like you to support our vital mission. We assure you that we will invest your gift wisely – in fact, this past year, the Endowment’s portfolio yielded an impressive 11% return!

I hope very much that you will join the Board in honoring Dick Arndt by making a generous contribution to the Roth Endowment this year. If you have not yet sent a gift this year, please consider increasing what you have given in the past. If you already have, please make another as a tribute to Dick’s abiding commitment to Lois Roth’s legacy and to greater cultural exchange and understanding. We need your help to continue making positive contributions to our world.

A review of the activities of the endowment.

Director, Roth Endowment
James L. Bullock became the part-time executive director of The Lois Roth Endowment on April 1, 2011, following a long Foreign Service career with the Department of State and the U.S. Information Agency. As a retiree, he has continued to be involved with various issues relating to international cultural exchange, both as a consultant to the Department of State and as a writer and volunteer. Prior to returning to the Washington area in 2010, Mr. Bullock was Vice President for Institutional Advancement at The American University in Cairo. His final active duty assignments with the Department of State were as head of US Embassy public affairs sections in Paris, Riyadh, Baghdad and Cairo. Earlier, in Washington, he served as Deputy Coordinator for Geographic Liaison in the International Information Programs Bureau, as an office director in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, and as a member of the Department’s “Senior Seminar.” Altogether, Bullock has over thirty-six years of government public affairs experience, with the Department of State, the U.S. Information Agency, and with the U.S. Navy. Overseas, he served primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. He was the U.S. Embassy’s press attaché in Moscow from 1989-1991. In the Navy, he served in public affairs assignments both at sea and ashore, including a “collateral duty” assignment as a White House social aide under Presidents Ford and Carter. After the Navy, Bullock worked in consumer product marketing with Procter & Gamble until he joined USIA. Bullock is a graduate of Yale College (Russian and Eastern European Studies). While in the Navy he completed a graduate short course in mass communications at the University of Oklahoma. During his Foreign Service career, he completed many professional training programs at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center, including French, Arabic and Russian language training. While working as a university administrator at The American University in Cairo he attended the “Institute for Educational Management” summer program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Bullock contributed the chapter "The Role of the Embassy Public Affairs Officer after 9/11," to Engaging the Arab and Islamic Worlds through Public Diplomacy, edited by William A, Rugh, Washington, DC. Public Diplomacy Council, 2004, pp. 35-48. Bullock is married to a French-American dual national, Carole Hoeveler. They live in Washington, DC with their two children, both also French-American dual nationals.

Board

Jill E. McGovern, (Chair) is Senior Consultant at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS), a research organization in Washington affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University and focused on U.S.-German relations. Previously, she served as CEO of The Marrow Foundation (1993-2007) and built the organization to a new level. Previously she had been Executive Director of the Baltimore International Festival and Senior Assistant to the President, The Johns Hopkins University. In 1975-81, she chaired the Department of Education at the College of Charleston SC. She earned a B.A. in English Literature from Northwestern University, an M.A. in Early Childhood Education from Xavier University (New Orleans), and a Ph.D. in Educational Administration from the same university. She spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mogmog, Ulithi, Federated States of Micronesia. In Baltimore she chaired the Board of the Babe Ruth Museum (1994-99), and remains with the Museum’s Advisory Council. She also served on the Board of the Baltimore Educational Scholarship Trust and with the Coalition on Donation. She is a member of the Board of the International Biomedical Research Alliance and the Legg Mason Funds. She is married to Steven Muller.

Richard Arndt, (Founder-trustee and Chairman-emeritus) Philadelphia-born, grew up in New York's Jersey suburbs. After working through his way through Princeton, he was a Fulbright Student in Franco-American literary relations at the University of Dijon, in the first year of Fulbright's French program (1949 50). He taught through the 1950s at Columbia University, where he took his PhD in French literature of the 18th-cntury in 1959. In 1961, he joined USIA and was assigned to Beirut. There he was caught by his discovery of cultural diplomacy, thanks to friends at the great American University of Beirut. To this little-known art, he made a career commitment that continues today. After Beirut came Sri Lanka (1963-66), followed by Tehran (1966-71). He was given a mid-career year at Princeton's Wilson School, focused on manpower economics, i.e. the relations of education to socio-political development. After Princeton, he worked in Latin American Affairs, then headed Youth Affairs and American Specialists in the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (1972-74). He went to Rome as Cultural Attaché (1974-78) and to Paris (1978-80), returning to various Washingon jobs in cultural affairs including Director of Policy and Plans, then Middle Eastern affairs (1980-85). Retiring in 1985, he began three and a half years of teaching at the University of Virginia, then three more at George Washington University, to which he later returned to head a graduate seminar on UNESCO in World Affairs. He has been President of the US Fulbright Association, Chairman of the National Peace Foundation, and President of Americans for UNESCO, organizing support for a productive US role in the organization which US withdrawal all but destroyed in 1984. He also chairs the US Committee to Save Ancient Tyre and is a member of several advisory bodies. He was principal editor of The Fulbright Difference in 1992, 40 memoirs of the impact of the Fulbright experience. His book The First Resort of Kings: US Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century appeared in April 2005, quickly went into a paperback edition, and is used in university courses across the U.S. His wife Lois W. Roth, an iconic US cultural diplomat, died in 1986; in her memory, Dr. Arndt founded and has chaired the Lois Roth Endowment since 1986. Established from the gifts and bequests of friends, it manages fourteen country projects in international exchange and awards translation prizes in four countries, in cooperation with two dozen like-minded NGOs. Four children and seven grandchildren from earlier marriages are scattered around the globe.

S. J. Arndt-Briggs, born to French and American parents, grew up the Columbia campus in New York. Her mother chaired the French Department at the Brearley School, from which she was graduated in 1972. At Princeton, she majored in French literature, with summer internships in various French institutions. She returned to graduate study in anthropology, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, first in physical anthropology, with a summer excavation in France's Périgord, then in cultural anthropology. A DAAD grant from the German government and a Fulbright grant a year later allowed her to interview scores of elderly residents of the Berlin district called Moabit for her doctoral dissertation, a study of the sense of place in Weimar Berlin (1999). She is presently acting director of the unique DEFA film archive at the University, containing all the feature films produced in East Germany from 1945 until the end of Soviet occupation and German reunification. DEFA circulates packages of these films around the country for teaching and research. She is married to Gregory Briggs, a UMass PhD in cultural anthropology and specialist in vocational education. They have two daughters aged 21 and 16, the older of whom graduates summa cum laude this year from the University of Colorado, and the younger of whom is a State champion in Mock Trial competitions.

Robert Bemis was born in Boston and educated at the Boston Latin School.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Haverford College, where he did his honors work on Gertrude Stein with the late Guy Davenport, and took a Master's degree in English literature, as a student of Helen C. White, at the University of Wisconsin.  After work as a journalist and critic, for The Boston Globe and the National Review (1962-1963), he taught English literature as a Fulbright lecturer in the College of Arts, University of Baghdad (1965-1967). From 1967 to 1969, he studied literature and writing and taught at the University of Texas (Austin). He entered the Foreign Service in 1970, learned Persian in Washington, and served at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran until 1975.  After learning Arabic in Beirut and in Tunis, he was director of the U.S. cultural center in Alexandria, Egypt from 1976 to 1978.  He served in several positions in the U.S. Information Agency in Washington and was then assigned as deputy counselor of public affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Rome (1982-1986).  An assignment to the National Security Council followed, as director for international and technology affairs (1986-1987).  Later, he was chief of policy planning for the U.S. Information Agency (1987-1991), public affairs advisor to U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels (1991-1995), and chief of Foreign Service personnel (USIA, 1995-1998).  Since his retirement from the Foreign Service, he has worked as an editor and translator and as a consultant for several bureaus in the Department of State, including the Office of the Inspector-General.   He has earned a number of awards for public service, including a Presidential Honor Award for work in coordinating government-wide public affairs projects.  His languages include Persian, Arabic, Italian, and French.

Harriet Mayor Fulbright holds a BA from Radcliffe and an MFA from the George Washington University, plus honorary doctorates from Long Island University and the Bank Street College of Education. She spent most of her career in education and the arts, teaching at a wide range of institutions ranging from Ewha Women's University in Korea to Moscow, where she taught English as a second language to first-graders. She taught art at several US institutions, including the American University and the Maret School in Washington, where in 1980 she was named Teacher of the Year.

She was assistant director for the Congressional Arts Caucus, then executive secretary of the World Congress of International Historians of Art 1985-86. In 1987-90 she was executive director of the US Fulbright Association, helping move it from Bryn Mawr to Washington and strengthening its foundations. In 1990-96 she was president of the Center for Arts in the Basic Curriculum, advocating educational reform. In 1994, she was Young Audiences Honoree of the Year and received Panama's highest civilian honor. She serves on a number of boards: the Fulbright International Center, University of Maryland; the Reves International Center, College of William and Mary; the Academy of Educational Development; Americans for UNESCO; and the National Foreign Language Center. In 1997-2000, she directed the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, serving also as unofficial Ambassador for the 50th anniversary of the Fulbright Program, for which she traveled to 16 countries and all over the U.S., speaking on international education.

From their marriage in 1990 until his death, she stood by the side of her husband Senator J. William Fulbright, enriching his last years.

Robert Gosende served for over 30 years in the Foreign Service of the United States in the U.S. Information Agency and the Department of State before joining the State University of New York as Associate Vice Chancellor for International Programs in 1998. Mr. Gosende's overseas experience includes tours of duty as a Cultural Affairs Office in Uganda, Libya, Somalia, and Poland and as Minister-Counselor for Press and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Embassies in South Africa and the Russian Federation. He also served as the President's Special Envoy for Somalia during the height of the humanitarian crisis in that country in 1992-93. Mr. Gosende was a Fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (1978-79) and a Diplomatic Associate at the Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (1992). He was the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Public Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (1994-95). He received Presidential Awards from President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton for his service as USIA's Director of African Affairs and as Special Envoy for Somalia. Mr. Gosende was elected to the National Board of NAFSA for a three year term in January of 2008. Mr. Gosende received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was awarded a Doctorate of Humane Letters from American International College in 1991 in recognition for his work promoting international educational and cultural exchange.

David Johnson, Professor of Planning Emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is a native of New York City. His BA and Master’s degrees in architecture and planning were earned at Yale and his PhD in regional planning was done at Cornell. Before his academic career, Dr. Johnson served on the staffs of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington, and the Regional Plan Association in New York City. His teaching career began as a faculty member and department chair in planning at Syracuse, Ball State, and Tennessee. His international experience covered more than 40 countries. In 1972 he directed an environmental research project in Yugoslavia; he was a Senior Fulbright scholar at the Moscow Institute of Architecture (1978), the first American urban planner to teach in the USSR; he held a teaching and research Fulbright in Cyprus in (1998-99), focused on the use of planning and development as bridges between the Greek and Turkish communities on that divided island; he also participated in or led faculty Fulbright groups to India and Thailand; and he directed research projects on deforestation in the Amazon and desertification in Kenya. On the domestic scene he was planner for the award-winning master plan for the State Capitol and Bicentennial Mall in Nashville. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Planning the Great Metropolis, which examined how planning shaped the New York Metropolitan Region. He is a Past-President of the US Fulbright Association and a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. He resides in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife, Eleanor Stephens Johnson, where they live on the Biltmore tract which Eleanor’s father helped manage. They dragged their three daughters, all Yale graduates, around the world. Out of all this came a bestselling novel by daughter Elizabeth (Kostova), and Backstage at the Revolution, a socio-historical study of the Paris Opera during the French Revolution, by their youngest, Victoria (Assistant Professor, University of Michigan). A third daughter, Jessica (Honigberg) is an accomplished musician and pianist, and an artist who is currently illustrating a children's book written by her father.

Federico Mayor, born in 1934 in Barcelona, did his doctorate in pharmacy, with highest honors, at the prestigious Complutense University in Madrid. He held the chair in pharmacy at the University of Granada 1963-73, spent a year at Oxford as senior fellow of Trinity College, working with Hans Krebs in biochemistry. He was named Rector of Granada in 1968. In 1972, he was named Honorary Rector of Granada and took the chair of pharmacy at Madrid's Free University. In 1974 he joined Spain's government as Undersecretary for Education and Science and chair of the Commission on Scientific and Technical Research; he continued at the Free University as Director of the Center of Molecular Biology. By then he had a world reputation in the study of cerebral metabolism, peri-natal biochemistry and molecular pathology. In 1977 he was elected to Parliament and appointed chair of the Committee on Education and Science, as well as as presidential advisor. In 1981-82 he was Spain's Minister of Education and Science and in 1987 he represented Spain at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. His links to various organizations outside Spain included the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1965, the Club of Rome in 1981, the International Brain Research Organization in 1980, the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters in 1981, the French Academy of Pharmacy in 1984, the International Cell Research Organization in 1984, the World Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985, the Venice Atheneum in 1990, the Royal Chemical Society in 1991, the American Academy of Microbiology in 1994, among others.

In 1976 he was a member of the board of UNESCO's Center for Higher Education in Bucharest and boardmember of the UN University in Tokyo. In 1978-91, he served UNESCO as Assistant Director General, then as Director General for two terms 1987-2000, during which time he turned the organization around after years of poor management. After UNESCO, he returned to Madrid, as vice-chairman of the Ramon Areces Foundation for science.

In December 2000 he launched a new global Foundation for a Culture of Peace. In 2001 he was named head of a new Spanish firm, FirstMark, working in broad-band communications with multinational partners. His honors and honorary degrees are numerous. In his quiet hours, he finds joy in writing the poems he publishes regularly.

Henry A. Millon, founder-trustee, is founding-Dean Emeritus of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (1979- 2001). He was educated in physics, architecture and art history at Tulane and Harvard, with a period in the US Navy. He was professor of the History of Architecture and Architetural Design at MIT until 1980 and Visiting Professor thereafter. He became Resident Art Historian at the American Academy of Rome in 1966, after residence at the Academy 1957- 60; he directed the Academy from 1973 to 1977. In 1978 he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, was a delegate of the International Committee for the History of Art, a member of the US National Committee for the History of Art, a convener of the Architectural Drawings Advisory Group, and a member of the editorial board of the Architectural History Foundation. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Diputazione di Storia Patri, Accademia di San Luca in Rome, and the Accademia delle Scienze in Turin. Among his publications: The Triumph of the Baroque in Europe, 1600-1750 (1999), editor; The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, with V. Lampuignani (1994); Michelangelo Architect, with C. H. Smyth (1988); Fillippo Juvara, Drawings from the Roman Period 1704-1714 (1984), editor; Key Monuments of the History of Architecture (1984); and Baroque and Rococo Architecture (1981). He is given primary credit for revealing, renovating and displaying the extraordinary wooden architect's models used in Baroque constructions in Italy and all over Europe, the basis for half a dozen or more major exhibits in which he participated.

Dr. Patti McGill Peterson, went to Washington as Executive Director of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), managing university relations with the senior Fulbight Program, and Vice President of the Institute of International Education (IIE). CIES, part of IIE, administers the Fulbright Scholar Program and other higher education programs.

From 1996 to 1998, she was Senior Fellow at Cornell University's Institute for Public Affairs where her work focused primarily on the nonprofit sector and its role in shaping public policy in the United States and abroad. Dr. Peterson is President Emerita at both Wells College and St. Lawrence University, where she held the presidencies from 1980 to 1996. She has served as Chair of the U.S.-Canada Commission for Educational Exchange, the American Council on Education's Commission on Academic Leadership and the Public Leadership Education Network. She is past president of the Association of Colleges and Universities of the State of New York. She speaks and publishes in the areas of public policy, the nonprofit sector and higher education in the U.S. and abroad.

William Alvarado Rivera received his A.B. with honors in Public Policy and American Institutions from Brown University, where he wrote an honors thesis on the impact of child support reform on poverty and welfare dependence in the state of Rhode Island. This led him to seek a Fulbright to Stockholm, where he studied Swedish child support and paternity-establishment policy. In Stockholm, he was one of the earliest recipients of a Roth Endowment research-support grant. He was the first alumnus to join the Endowment board, where he now handles alumni relations. After Stockholm, he moved to Stanford where he He received the J.D. from the Law School in 1995. He then moved to Washington and spent seven years in the Civil Division of the US Department of Justice, where he represented various federal agencies and officials on matters of commercial, constitutional, administrative, and privacy law. In 2002 he moved to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He currently serves as Chief of Litigation in the Division of Children, Families and Aging in the Department’s Office of the General Counsel. He provides legal counsel to HHS on administrative and court litigation and other matters relating to Federal programs addressing the needs of children and families, including Child Support Enforcement, Head Start, Foster Care, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. He served previously as Acting Deputy Commissioner of the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), where he oversaw the management and operation of OCSE. When he joined HHS, he was Senior Advisor to the Commissioner of OCSE, advising on a variety of policy matters, including efforts to integrate child support enforcement with related HHS priorities, such as healthy marriage, responsible fatherhood, and community and faith-based initiatives. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the Hispanic Bar Association of the District of Columbia, the DC Bar, and the State Bar of California. He has served as a member of the Boards of the Arlington Partnership for Children, Youth and Families and the Arlington Little League. His wife Tara Isa Koslov, Brown classmate and Harvard Law graduate, is Attorney-Advisor for a Commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. They have two daughters, Alannah and Lydia.

Steven Muller, Founder-Member, is President Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins University, a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, and Distinguished Professorial Lecturer at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. He served as the tenth president of the Johns Hopkins University from February 1, 1972, to June 30, 1990 and until 1983 as President of the Hopkins Hospital.  Dr. Muller is a founder of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) and currently serves as Co-Chair Emeritus of its Trustees. He is also a Director of the Atlantic Council, a member of the Board of the International Biomedical Research Alliance, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Association of Rhodes Scholars, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.  He has served twice as a Director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He served for years  as Chairman of the Board of St. Mary's College of Maryland, which honored him in January 2004 with the Order of the Ark and the Dove.

Dr. Muller is a specialist in comparative government and international relations, focused primarily Europe. He is the author of a textbook in comparative government and of professional articles in this field and in higher education. In recognition of his contributions to German-American relations, he was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1980. In 1988, he was named Commendatore by the President of Italy.

In past years, Dr. Muller served as a member and Chairman of the Association of American Universities; chairman of the Association of American Medical Colleges panel on medical education (GPEP); founding Chairman of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities; a Director of the Council on Financial Aid to Education; a member of the NASA Advisory Council; and Chairman of the Council's Task Force on NASA-University Relations; and a member of two Presidential Commissions: The White House Fellowships, and World Hunger. He has also been a member of the Board of Editors of Daedalus; a Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; a Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art; and a Trustee of the Consortium for the Advancement of Higher Education.  He twice served as a Director of the Greater Baltimore Committee.

He chaired the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.  He was a member of the Board of Directors of Alex. Brown Incorporated, Beneficial Corporation, Commercial Credit Corporation, CSX Corporation, Millipore Corporation, ORC Worldwide, Safeway Corporation, and Van Kampen Closed-End Funds.

Before moving to Johns Hopkins as Provost in April 1971, Dr. Muller served from 1966 until 1971 as Vice President for Public Affairs at Cornell University. From 1961 until 1966, he held the position of Director of Cornellís Center for International Studies. Between 1961 and 1971, he  held a tenured appointment at Cornell University as Associate Professor of Government. He has continued to teach both undergraduate and graduate students while fulfilling his administrative responsibilities.

Dr. Muller graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1948. From 1949 to 1951, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he received a B.Litt. degree in politics in 1951. He went to Cornell University in 1951 as a graduate student in Government and received his Ph.D in 1958. He served in the United States Army Signal Corps in 1954-1955. From 1956-1958, he was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Haverford College before returning to Cornell.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, on November 22, 1927, he emigrated with his family to England in 1939, and first came to the United States in 1940. He was naturalized in 1949. His first wife, Margie, was Banking Commissioner for the State of Maryland. He is now married to Dr. Jill McGovern, former Chief Executive Officer of The Marrow Foundation. Dr. Muller, who lives in Washington, D.C., has two married daughters, three grandsons, and two granddaughters.

The Lois Roth Endowment fosters and supports human exchanges across national, linguistic and cultural boundaries to enhance international understanding.  We make small investments in people in a selected number of countries, many of which Lois Roth knew—Australia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Iran, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States.  We work with Fulbright Commissions in many of these countries.  Additionally, in tandem with the Modern Language Association of America and other non-governmental organizations, we offer prizes for literary translations into English from Persian and other world languages, and from English into French and Bulgarian. 

The Endowment honors the life and work of Lois W. Roth (1931 – 1986), American cultural diplomat.

Lois was born in New York City to Louis Wersba, a manufacturer of fine clothing, and Natalie Mann, daughter of a theatrical family; both had a discerning eye for art and theatre. Her first language was French, thanks to a nanny, but fluency in the language would always elude her. Her early education in public schools led to study at the Fieldston School, an offshoot of the Ethical Culture movement, graced by noteworthy teachers and classmates, among them the two daughters of Lois’ adoptive mother, the Swedish-American, Anne O. Thomson.

She chose to attend Elmira College, where she was enchanted by art history but little else. She transferred to Barnard College, where she drifted towards the social sciences.

An early marriage to Robert Roth, son of family friends, ended in divorce. Returning from life as a military wife in Texas and Virginia, she began graduate studies in sociology at Columbia University, under Robert and Helen Lynd, Paul Lazarsfeld, C. Wright Mills, Nathan Glazer, and other major scholars at a great moment in American social thought. One of these scholars was the Swedish sociologist, Hans Zetterberg, soon to head Sweden’s equivalent of the Gallup polls and later to serve as editor in chief for the Svenska Dagbladet.

She won a Fulbright grant to Uppsala University in the early 1950s. It was a seminal moment. She learned Swedish with ease and in depth. In the Fall if 1966, when Lois Roth had had left the American Scandinavian Foundation and was awaiting orders to proceed to the US Embassy in Tehran, she spent her evenings translating the mystery novel Roseanna by the Swedish couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.  It was published by Pantheon Books in the Spring of 1967. It has remained in print for four decades.

At Uppsala University, she made life-long friends, among them Hans Blix, Swedish diplomat, foreign minister, and finally head of the IAEC.

In Sweden, Lois, by nature self-conscious and reticent, though afraid of nothing--except, as close friends knew, of public speaking—-would find the way she wanted to live her life: to be the best she could be at making serious, lasting connections across cultures, friendships that overcame the zig-zags of a transient international life. Her curiosity and her warmth were boundless, and those she knew understood and responded to both. On her return to the U.S., she joined the American-Scandinavian Foundation as special assistant to president, Lithgow Osborne, and his next two successors. She did everything--translations, publications, event-planning, hosting--and swiftly became the indispensable “Girl Friday,” in the phrase of the time. One major achievement was to help persuade the Ford Foundation to give 40 extensive familiarization grants to prominent Finns, each of whom she shepherded around the U.S. Bringing Finland into the ASF program, she became in the process a kind of celebrity in Finland: arriving in Helsinki for a visit on the same day as Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, she found her picture and story above the front-page fold, with LBJ’s below.

In 1961 like many others, she was galvanized by the Kennedy moment and applied to join the U.S. Information Agency. But women were not then taken on by USIA for lateral entry, so she entered the Agency’s foreign service only five years later. She was assigned to Tehran, serving first as deputy to the Cultural Affairs Officer and then as director of the huge Iran-America Society (IAS), a bi-national organization devoted to cultural exchanges, fine and performing arts, and English language learning. The IAS had three large buildings, half a dozen branches throughout Iran, three stages, three restaurants, two art galleries, and two libraries; it taught English to 5,000 Iranians a day and ran the only student center in Iran, across the street from Tehran University. Under her direction, the IAS became one of the single most significant centers of cultural activity in Iran, then in a ferment of cultural activity and experimentation. After five years in Tehran came the first of several demanding jobs in Washington and abroad: desk officer for the Scandinavian countries and Washington consultant for bi-national centers worldwide.

She also found herself elected Secretary of the American Foreign Service Association, at a time when the so-called Young Turks were pressing for serious reform in the State Department. In April of 1973, she married Richard Arndt, a Tehran colleague. Returning abroad, she served as cultural program officer in Rome, then Paris.

In 1980, she came back to the U.S., first to spend a year in the prestigious Senior Seminar, a year-long inter-agency program preparing participants for upper-echelon leadership roles. She was named USIA’s director for centers, books, libraries, and English teaching, then moved to head the Agency’s global program for fine and performing arts (Arts America), which she began seriously to re-imagine, devoting to it the kind of energy and why-not creativity which were the hallmarks of everything she had done.

An early bout with cancer in 1982 seemed to have been overcome and failed to slow her down. In parallel to her USIA assignments, she headed the Women’s Action Organization (WAO) and played a role in reshaping embassy life for women and spouses. As always, she continued to serve as mentor to a younger generation of foreign service officers, seeking to imbue them with her spirit and offer them the kind of training in the arts of cultural and intellectual diplomacy that was usually missing in institutional orientation efforts. Lois Roth wrote two articles which had a deep impact on the thinking of USIA’s foreign service: her article for WAO, “Nice Girl or Pushy Bitch: Two Roads to Non-Promotion,” reported on two periods of service with promotion panels ten years apart; she analyzed how women officers across many years were kept or kept themselves from promotions by stereotyping.

Her second major paper was produced originally during her years in the Department of State’s Senior Seminar: published first by State, then by Tufts University, it found its fullest expression in an updated version anthologized by Ulloth and Brasch in The Press and the State (1986). The paper, “Public Diplomacy and the Past: The Search for an American Style of Propaganda 1952-1977,” examines the tension between long-standing, competing ideas of how the U.S. conducts what is now termed “public diplomacy,” detailing the struggle between the commitment of “information” to short-term foreign policy aims and culture’s approach, reaching a decade or two ahead, and leaving service to foreign policy as an inevitable by-product. Lois died of complications from recurrent cancer in January 1986.

The idea of an endowment to memorialize this generous life arose from the outpouring of sadness for the telling loss of a woman at the peak of her career. It has built up over more than two decades from the regular modest contributions of hundreds of her friends, later from those who were not fortunate enough to have known her but only knew of her, and from the gratitude of its early grantee-alumni. Spurts of growth resulted from bequests and living bequests which helped lift the Endowment sharply at various moments. These gifts came from friends like Anne O. and Fred Thomson, Fulbrighter-daughter Elizabeth Kostova, Lois’ sister Carolyn and John Rosenthal, USIA and State colleagues Dr. Martin C. and Faye Carroll Jr., Col. Richard R. and Myriam Hallock, and the Delevan Foundation, and various anonymous donors. The Endowment’s prestigious and devoted board has stood strongly in place since the beginning and has recently been joined by younger colleagues. Today, the Endowment is laying plans for continued growth into the future so that this unique effort can survive the lives of those who first built it.