Associate Professor of History Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award in history to Norway for the 2025-2026 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign
Scholarship Board.
Dr. Renberg, who is on the faculty of the Anderson University College of Arts and Sciences, will be working as a researcher at the University of Tromsø, partnering with one of their research centers, Creating the New North, and working with a couple of other academic departments and faculties on campus as she works on her book project.
“The book I am going to be working on is using methods from dance studies from history and theology to help us learn more about the construction of community, identity and belief and medieval Finnish Scandia,” Dr. Renberg said. “We’ll be looking at encounters between the Sámi, the indigenous people who live in the far north of Europe, and medieval European travelers.”
Dr. Renberg noted that a challenge in studying relations between these two groups is that the Sámi left few written texts.
“There is a significant language barrier, and in a lot of the texts that European travelers left, they didn’t record anything from the Sámi and in the Sámi‘s own words or perspective, but they described a lot of things, like dances and processions and songs,” Dr. Renberg said. “I’ll be using methods from dance studies to analyze these texts as well as to analyze material culture like drums and artifacts from Sámi culture and working with Sámi scholars—both people who study Sámi and individuals who are Sámi to understand in these first encounters what Europeans thought about the Sámi, what they believed, how did the Sámi understand Europeans and what Europeans believed, and how can reading history more expansively using performance as a way to understand what happened in the past help us better understand these past encounters when we don’t have written sources.”
Fulbright U.S. Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. Fulbright Scholars engage in cutting-edge research and expand their professional networks, often continuing research collaborations started abroad and laying the groundwork for forging future partnerships between institutions. Upon returning to their home countries, institutions, labs and classrooms, they share their stories and often become active supporters of international exchange, inviting foreign scholars to
campus and encouraging colleagues and students to go abroad.
Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 400,000 talented and accomplished students, scholars, teachers, artists and professionals with the opportunity to study, teach, and conduct research abroad. Fulbrighters exchange
ideas, build people-to-people connections and work to address complex global challenges.
Notable Fulbrighters include 62 Nobel Laureates, 93 Pulitzer Prize winners, 82 MacArthur Fellows, 44 heads of state or government, and thousands of leaders across the private, public, and non-profit sectors. More than 800 individuals teach or conduct research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program annually. In addition,
more than 2,000 Fulbright U.S. Student Program participants—recent college graduates, graduate students, and early career professionals—participate in study/research exchanges or as English teaching assistants in local schools abroad each year.
Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the Program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide. In the United States, the Institute of International Education implements the Fulbright U.S. Student and U.S. Scholar
Programs on behalf of the U.S. Department of State.
For more information about the Fulbright Program, visit https://fulbrightprogram.org