The Stonehill faculty member will conduct research in Armenia and Japan examining international power dynamics.
Anna Ohanyan, Stonehill College’s Richard B. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Political Science & International Relations, has received the prestigious Fulbright Global Scholar Award, which allows U.S. academics and professionals to engage in multi-country, multi-regional projects. This is the third Fulbright honor of her career.
“The Fulbright is an impactful program and an important tool of U.S. foreign policy in promoting global understanding through research and teaching,” she said. “I feel privileged to be part of the Fulbright community. I was both thrilled and humbled to receive this honor.”
The award will support her current book project, which seeks to challenge widely accepted understandings of how states navigate a world order that is simultaneously fragmenting and realigning.
“Understanding how smaller states and middle powers develop and operate in the shadow of great power competition is a central question driving this research,” she said. “It is an important one, because examining the behavior and survival strategies of these states at a time of heightened great power competition can help generate policy insights for a more stable and peaceful global order.”
As part of the project, Ohanyan will spend five months conducting research in Armenia. She will also expand her fieldwork to Japan and East Asia, building on research she previously conducted in South Korea and Turkey through Stonehill’s Richard B. Finnegan Fund.
Ohanyan emphasized that her efforts will better position her to contribute to public discourse that supports the peaceful management of ongoing global order transitions.
“Armed conflict and great power rivalry do not have to determine the shape of the future international order,” she said. “Understanding the role of smaller states and middle powers is crucial for generating policy insights that can support peaceful transitions across the broader Eurasian continent, which remains fractured by armed conflicts and wars of varying intensity.”
The Stonehill faculty member received her first Fulbright, which was a U.S. Scholar Award, during the 2012–2013 academic year. The grant supported research she conducted in Armenia to help diversify technology within Armenian higher education institutions and create professional development programs for faculty at those colleges and universities. She also explored the prospects and limitations of regional cooperation in areas like the Balkans and South Caucasus. Her work resulted in the publication of her second book, Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management, by Stanford University in 2015.
Ohanyan’s second Fulbright, also a U.S. Scholar Award, supported her sabbatical and fifth book project, The Neighborhood Effect: The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia, published by Stanford University in 2022. She spent the summers of 2020 and 2021 working at the American University of Armenia, where she taught a Peace and Conflict Studies course.
The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international academic exchange initiative. It advances knowledge and innovation, fosters solutions to complex global challenges, and promotes peaceful relations between the United States and other nations.
