Fulbright institute beckons ASU’s Fellner to Bulgaria

Dan Fellner, a faculty associate in the School of Applied Arts and Sciences, and Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, has been selected to teach a course in public relations at the Fulbright International Summer Institute (FISI) in Tryavna, Bulgaria.

FISI is an academic and cultural program created by the Bulgarian-American Fulbright Commission in 2002 that offers one-week intensive courses in a wide variety of subject areas.

From Aug. 11-15, Fellner will be teaching a course called “Public Relations: It Can Make or Break an Organization.” More than 30 students from 11 countries have enrolled in his course.

This will be Fellner’s fifth teaching stint in Eastern Europe. As a Fulbright scholar in Latvia and Moldova, and a Fulbright senior specialist in Lithuania, he has taught university courses in journalism and public relations and conducted training programs for media professionals.

Fellner has more than 25 years of experience in corporate public relations, television news and university teaching. He has been a faculty associate at ASU since 1998 and owns a public relations consulting business.

On the way to Bulgaria, Fellner plans to stop in Kosovo to visit the “world’s newest country.” Fellner, who teaches a course at ASU’s Polytechnic campus titled International Mass Communication, says “these kinds of trips give me a lot of fodder for class discussions.”

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, media systems in Eastern Europe basically have been built from scratch, Fellner says.

The trip is funded by the Humanities and Arts program at the Polytechnic campus, and ASU’s Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, of which Fellner is a faculty affiliate.