Fulbright Prize in American Studies

Michael Meister won the 2025 Fulbright Prize in American Studies for his MA thesis on “Intermedial Eco-Poetry as Monumental Writer-Activism” (Advisor: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nassim W. Balestrini), in which he intertwines multiple theoretical discourses and an in-depth analysis of Guam-born CHamoro writer Craig Santos Perez’s poetry volume Habitat Threshold. This thesis elucidates how the aesthetics of documental poetry can impact cultural memory, especially with regard to inserting willfully forgotten details into the historiography of environmental injustices. Michael Meister convincingly argues that a book of poems transforms into an “ecopoetry monument” which recipients can access through “a process of reading as relating that can overcome perceptual gaps in an age of abundantly accessible digital information.”