MSUM Professor Receives Fulbright Award

I’m never surprised when MSUM students or employees receive national—or international—recognition. As I noted in a recent column, the list of awards and recognitions earned by our students and employees in the last year alone is too long to do justice here. None-the-less, each new honor feels both thrilling and gratifying. So, it is with great pride and excitement that I congratulate the most recent Fulbright Scholar at MSUM: Dr. Anthony (Tony) Adah, professor of film studies.

As the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government, the Fulbright Program is designed to forge lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries while advancing cross-cultural understanding and helping people and nations work together toward common goals. To those ends, Dr. Adah will spend this semester lecturing and conducting research at Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos, Nigeria, which is home to the Nollywood Studies Centre. His research project, “Curating Nollywood for Classroom and Research,” will advance the work of the Centre while providing a wealth of knowledge about the world’s second largest movie industry (second only to India’s Bollywood). There’s no doubt that Tony’s film studies students will reap the benefits of this extraordinary experience when he returns to MSUM.

When he returns, Tony will be one of two Fulbright alumni in MSUM's film studies program, along with Dr. Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson. In total, there are seven former Fulbright Scholars among the current and recently retired faculty in MSUM's arts and humanities programs. They're all in good company: Fulbright alumni have gone on to achieve additional distinctions in many fields, including 60 who have been awarded the Nobel Prize and 86 who have received Pulitzer Prizes.

I couldn’t be happier for Tony—and his future students.

Dr. Anne Blackhurst served as Minnesota State University Moorhead’s 11th president from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2023.