Debbie Durham, associate professor of anthropology, has received a Fulbright grant to conduct research in Turkey next year. She plans a July departure and will remain in the country for nearly a year.

The grant is Durham's second under a Fulbright program. The first was a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad.

"This is a new project I'm starting in Turkey, with the hopes of it being long term," Durham said.

Her previous field work in Botwana did turn into years-long projects. There she focused variously on a minority culture — the Herero people — in a liberal democracy and on youth in Botswana.

Durham's latest interest is aging, class and modernity in Turkey.

"The gist is that we typically think of youth as spearheading social and cultural changes," she said. "I want to look at how the elderly and aging in general take an active role in refashioning social relations and modernity.

"I'm particularly drawn to Turkey because of its vibrant culture, strong and growing economy, and its multiple modernities, including a thriving Islamic modernity as well as a western-oriented cosmopolitanism."

Durham says her Turkish is "pretty basic," but she'll undergo two months of intensive language classes to ready for the trip. What she does know comes from two years of study with Turkish instructors who were teaching in America under the Fulbright program.

Durham's Fulbright is the second in three years to be awarded to a member of SBC's anthropology department. Claudia Chang spent the spring semester of 2006 at a women's university in India on a teaching Fulbright.