Maximillian Renfro
Fulbright/University of Southampton Award
Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Second Lieutenant Maximillian Renfro is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Recognizing the fragile, yet enduring peace and prosperity America’s government guarantees for its citizens, Maximillian has dedicated his life to its preservation. That mission drove him to West Point, the nation’s premier institution for public service. During the summer of his sophomore year, Maximillian attended a NATO military exercise hosted by the Italian Army.
That experience demonstrated to him the importance of America’s international partners and the baffling complexity of working across cultural and linguistic barriers. Those twin realizations drove him to focus his undergraduate academic research on nationalism, translation, and cross-cultural communication. Maximillian will expand on this work while studying Languages and Cultures at the University of Southampton. There, he will study the effectiveness of the cultural engagement techniques used by America’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams during the Iraq War. In addition to this scholarly opportunity, Maximillian will take part in a military exchange with the Outreach Group of the British Army’s 11th Security Forces Assistance Brigade. Following graduate school, Maximillian will serve in the United States Army as a Military Intelligence officer at Fort Lewis, Washington.