Fulbright Prize in American Studies

Dr. De Bettin Padolin won the 2025 Fulbright Prize in American Studies for her dissertation “Staging the Planet: Indigenous Dramaturgies and Decolonial Aesthetics in Contemporary Performance” (First Reader: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nassim W. Balestrini; Second Reader: ao.Prof. Dr. Klaus Rieser). This innovative study makes a convincing case for the interventions that Native American aesthetic forms provide in the context of contemporary crises and in pursuing decolonial objectives. The study presents an outstanding, tight-knit, and extensive discussion of the broad range of theories necessary for the topic. The corpus of a dozen twenty-first-century dramatic works and performances offers a highly relevant panorama of Indigenous artists’ engagement with climate change. Importantly, these playwrights, theatermakers, and performers approach decoloniality not only as a process of liberation and of asserting sovereignty but also as a method of centering solutions inherent in Native ways of thinking and living.