İhsan Doğramacı was born in 1915 in Erbil (now in the north of Iraq), the son of an important family of Ottoman bureaucrats. He attended the International College of the American University of Beirut until 1932 and then studied medicine at Istanbul University, graduating in 1938. Later that year, thanks to the connections of his uncle Lutfi Kırdar, who was a doctor and the provincial governor of Manisa, he met Dr. Albert Eckstein, a prominent expert in the field of paediatrics and one of the German-Jewish scientists who had found refuge in Turkey in 1935. This was a turn in his career.

In 1950, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a fellowship to Jacques Freymond, a professor of history in Lausanne, Switzerland, in order to visit various universities in the United States. This year abroad represented a turning point in his professional career. In the following years, the professor’s career accelerated, and in 1955 he became director of the prestigious Graduate Institute of International Studies (Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales, IUHEI) in Geneva. The rest of his career did not depend solely on this fellowship, but what it gave him facilitated a certain sequence of activities and duties.

En 1950, Jacques Freymond, un professeur d’histoire à Lausanne en Suisse, séjourne dans différentes universités aux États-Unis grâce à une fellowship de la Fondation Rockefeller. Cette année passée à l’étranger représente un moment charnière dans son parcours professionnel. Dans les années qui suivent, la carrière du professeur s’accélère et il prend en 1955 la direction du prestigieux Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales (IUHEI) à Genève. Toute la suite de son parcours ne dépend pas uniquement de cette bourse, mais ce qu’elle lui apporte facilite un certain enchaînement de mandats.

The earliest grants in our database were awarded to Chinese individuals in 1914, just one year after the Foundation began to operate in New York. While this was the first set of individual travel grants that the Rockefeller philanthropy granted to China, it was far from the first received by Chinese individuals.

År 1968 blev Olov Fryckstedt den första professur i amerikansk litteratur vid Uppsala universitet i Sverige. Finansieringen för lärostolen möjliggjordes genom okoordinerade investeringar av privata stiftelser och statliga organ i Sverige och USA. Professuren var centrerad kring Amerikanska institutet vid Uppsala universitet, ett institut som året 1985 formaliserades som Svenska institutet för nordamerikastudier (SINAS). Mycket av forskningen och undervisningen om USA förlagd till Uppsala universitet än idag.

In 1968, Olov Fryckstedt became the first chaired professor of American literature at Uppsala University in Sweden. Funding for this chair was hard-won, made possible through the uncoordinated investments of private foundations and governmental bodies in Sweden and the United States. The professorship was centered around the American Institute at Uppsala University, an informal institute that became formalized as the Swedish Institute for North American Studies in 1985. To this day, much of the research and teaching about the United States is situated at Uppsala University.