Michelle Metro-Roland

Dr. Michelle Metro-Roland works on issues of international student inclusion and is the campus representative for the Fulbright program at Western Michigan University. She is the Program Advisor for domestic students wishing to apply for Fulbright grants and the FSA—Foreign Student Advisor—for Fellows pursuing their graduate degrees at WMU. As the Campus Scholar Liaison she assists WMU faculty interested in applying for Fulbright awards and international scholars who are being hosted by the university. Dr. Metro-Roland also advises for other nationally competitive grants for study abroad including the Boren Awards, Gilman and Freeman-Asia.

Metro-Roland is a cultural geographer and an affiliate professor in the Department of Geography. Her research explores landscape, place and material culture and is concerned with questions of interpretation and embodied experience. Her recent work has investigated the ways in which various scales of local, national and global culture interact in the built environment. Metro-Roland has published numerous articles and book chapters, a monograph, Tourists, Signs and the City: The Semiotics of Culture in an Urban Landscape, and is co-author of Tourism, Performance, and Place: A Geographic Perspective, and co-editor of Landscape, Tourism, and Meaning. She is a founding member of the Landscape Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.

Metro-Roland has studied, researched, and taught internationally. She has studied classics at the University of Nottingham, and Latin in Rome, taught English in a technical high school in Budapest, Hungary, and North American Civilization at South East European University in Macedonia, and she received a Fulbright-Hays DDRA award for field work in Budapest.