The USC 2024-25 Fulbright Scholars will conduct research and teach in locations from Mexico to Europe and the Middle East.
Four USC faculty members and two doctoral candidates, including USC Gould School of Law Professor Jessica Marglin, have been named recipients of Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program awards for the 2024-25 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the highly competitive Fulbright awards support scholars in teaching and conducting research abroad. The six Trojans are among more than 800 scholars who will work abroad and expand their networks of professional colleagues through the program.
Fulbright Scholarship supports Mediterranean history project
Jessica Marglin, a professor of religion, law and history who holds the Ruth Ziegler Chair in Jewish Studies, will use her award to support research in France for her book project The Extraterritorial Mediterranean: Sovereignty and Jurisdiction in the Nineteenth Century. She’ll be affiliated with the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris.
Marglin’s scholarship focuses on the history of Jews in North Africa and the Mediterranean and of non-Muslims in the Islamic world, with a particular emphasis on law. Her new book will explore “extraterritoriality,” a legal status under which non-native individuals can claim exemption from local laws. It’s similar to the modern concept of diplomatic immunity, Marglin said.
Extraterritoriality is largely extinct today, but in the 19th century, she said, all foreigners in the Ottoman Empire or Morocco benefited from this law: “From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the First World War, extraterritoriality provided the legal glue that bound together huge numbers of people on the move across the Middle Sea.”
This is Marglin’s second experience with the Fulbright program. From 2006 to 2007, a Fulbright Scholarship funded her study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
USC 2024-25 Fulbright Scholars: About the program
Since 1946, the Fulbright Scholars Program has enabled more than 400,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists and professionals to study, teach and conduct research in over 160 countries.
Notable Fulbrighters include 62 Nobel laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, 41 heads of state or government, and thousands of leaders across the private, public and nonprofit sectors.
This article was originally published on USC Today. Read more here.
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