Wallace Genser assists students seeking national and international fellowships to fund their continued study through programs such as the Rhodes, Marshall, Mitchell, Gates, Churchill, Schwarzman, Knight-Hennessy, Goldwater, and Thouron Awards, as well as the President's Engagement Prizes. He earned his BA in English at Rutgers and his MA and PhD in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and taught for fifteen years in the departments of American Culture, History, and Social Relations at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. His research as a cultural historian focuses on transformations in ethnic, gender, and racial identities on the nineteenth-century US borderlands, and his current interests include nationalism, citizenship debates, and conceptions of the US in historical writing and contemporary discourse. His initial role at Penn focused on promoting undergraduate research through initiatives such as the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring program (PURM) and other research grants, and he served as Staff Director of the Undergraduate Research Working Group for Penn's 2014 Middle States Reaccreditation Self-Study.