Seven Kansas University students have won Fulbright awards to research, study or teach abroad during the upcoming school year, KU announced Friday.

Since the program’s inception in 1946, 454 KU students have been selected for Fulbright awards, according to the university.

The newly announced winners:

• Megan Blocksom, an art history doctoral student from Cleveland, plans to travel to the Netherlands to research representations of processions from the 17th century Dutch Republic. These culturally significant images have remained unexamined by scholars of Dutch art.

• Gwyn Bourlakov, a history doctoral student from Arvada, Colo., will study state and church archives in Russia to establish that women in the settlement of Siberia were an integral part of empire building there.

• Meredith Chait, a recent international studies and journalism graduate from Chicago, received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award for Latvia.

• Kirsten Devin, a KU Medical student from Omaha, Neb., plans to complete her project on women’s preventative health interventions, including tobacco cessation and cervical cancer screening, in Brazil.

• Jennifer Glaubius, a geography doctoral student from Chambers, Neb., will research landscape evolution of terraced terrain in Greece, the focus of her dissertation.

• George Klaeren, history doctoral student from Rock Hill, S.C., will investigate the effect of new and traditional epistemological practices in 18th century Spain, seen in the Inquisition and in intellectual treatises of the time.

• Nathaniel Pickett, geography doctoral student from Whittier, Calif., will travel to Ukraine to research the Chernobyl incident and the Soviet government’s response, which constituted a fundamental political reconfiguration of Soviet-Ukrainian and Russo-Ukrainian relations.

The Fulbright program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, aims to increase mutual understanding between people of the United States and other countries, according to the Department of State. There are separate Fulbright programs for scholars, teachers and professionals.