Singer Brett Umlauf holds a B.A. cum laude in Classics from Dartmouth College and an M.L.I.S. from the Palmer School. At Jacobs School of Music, she is a Performer Diploma candidate in the Historical Performance Institute. Brett is dedicated to showcasing the creative output of women religious writers and composers from medieval times to the present and exploring new modes of access to their works. Her long-form project Hazelnut Road: Vows of Stability, Acts of Mobility is a multi-sited “pilgrimage” comprising research and performance of women’s works on their respective historical home turfs. The current focus of Hazelnut Road is Kassia of Byzantium, the 9th-century abbess and earliest known woman composer with extant works. The Fulbright Greece-Turkey Joint Research Award allows Brett to study Kassia’s works amongst chant practitioners and monastic communities that carry on the living tradition of Byzantine music. She will also collaborate with contemporary artists to bring Kassia to new audiences. Brett will be affiliated with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and the Women's Museum of Istanbul in Turkey.

Emily Chesley is a PhD Candidate in late antique History at Princeton University. For her Fulbright Greece-Turkey Joint Research Award, she will research the lives of women from the Byzantine province of Syria (modern day Turkey, Syria, and Iraq) during the 5th–8th centuries CE. Her project, “A Social History of Women in Byzantine Syria,” seeks to understand how the roles and status of women in the rural, eastern part of the Roman Empire differed from those in urban centers like Constantinople. Emily will examine a wide range of sources: hagiographical manuscripts and physical artifacts held in libraries and museums in Istanbul and Athens, and Syriac archaeological sites in eastern Turkey. She will collaborate with faculty and researchers at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens while in Greece and at Boğaziçi University while in Turkey. Emily previously earned a B.A. from Azusa Pacific University (2013), an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary (2018), and an M.A. in History from Princeton University (2021). She was a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress (2016) and received the Dr. Jack Jallo and Mrs. Gage Johnston Fellowship in Digital Humanities at Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute (2018).