What is the Fulbright Award?

 

Back in the mid ‘40s there was a United States senator, William Fulbright, who founded the Fulbright Program, Justin McBrayer, associate professor of philosophy, said.

 

Fulbright started the program that is administered by the the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and funded by congress, McBrayer said.

 

The program takes American scholars and sends them abroad to work at universities throughout the world and also bring students from abroad here to the states to study under U.S. scholars, he said.

 

Fulbright thought that to avert disasters like WWII, the U.S. needed to meet and interact with people in other countries on a routine basis, McBrayer said.

 

On average there are 1,200 U.S. scholars who are sent abroad every year as Fulbright scholars, he said.

 

“These scholars go anywhere in the world and do any different kind of project,” McBrayer said. “They could be just doing research, they could just be doing teaching, or they could be doing a combination of both, teaching and research.”

 

Receiving the Fulbright Award

 

In order to receive the Fulbright Award, American scholars must first write up a grant proposal, he said.

 

There are five components to the proposal, they state where they want to go, what they want to do, why it's good for them, why it's good for their home institution and why it's good for the place they will go visit, McBrayer said.

 

Then all of the applications submitted are gathered from across the country, and are reviewed by panels of experts in their given disciplines, he said.

 

Out of all of the proposals that are worth doing the ECA of the U.S. Department of State brings the proposals to the country where a proposal is being made and then that second decision is made by the liaison or the person abroad, McBrayer said.

 

To be eligible for a Fulbright Award a professor must have tenure which is also required to use a sabbatical, he said.

 

Professors who have tenure can receive a sabbatical, but can only receive one every 7 years, McBrayer said.

 

Sabbaticals let professors take a semester off for study or travel for salary pay, or a full year for half-salary pay, he said.

 

A Fulbright is not a paid position but recipients try to defer their expenses with the grant money, McBrayer said.

 

Nancy Cardona, associate professor of English

 

For Cardona, her Fulbright is run through the country of Norway, she said.

 

Norway runs it through the center for foreign language and culture and the particular Fulbright is designed to serve both their teachers and their students in high schools and secondary school, Cardona said.

 

They hire three U.S. roving scholars in American studies and culture to travel around the country, and provide workshops on American history and culture to students and then to provide professional development workshops to faculty, she said.

 

Cardona’s Fulbright is for purely teaching, and it is less restricted in terms of qualifications, she said.

 

For example high school teachers from America could even apply as long as they have the credentials, Cardona said.

 

When submitting the application usually a professor would send in a syllabus for the class they would teach abroad, but in Cardona’s case she submitted proposed workshops she would have for high school students and teachers, she said.

 

Cardona will be headquartered in Oslo and then depending on what schools request her to travel to their school in Norway and teach workshops to students and teachers, she said.

 

Workshops she proposed were looking at American history through popular culture, Cardona said.

 

“I wanted to look at clips of ‘Little House on the Prairie’, and clips from ‘Gossip Girl’ and things like that to talk about the rise of consumer culture or the expansion of the West and the Frontier,” she said.

 

As another option, Cardona offered to discuss the upcoming U.S. presidential election, she said.

 

“They told me that Norwegians are obsessed with American politics and so that’s what I intend to concentrate on,” Cardona said.

 

She will be there for the school year, they expect her to be there late August for orientation and then the position is finished in mid June when the school year is over, she said.

 

Cardona will be back at FLC in fall 2017 to continue teaching, she said.

 

“I never went abroad as an undergraduate, I did not have the means to do so, and so this opportunity is something that I never would have imagined,” Cardona said.

 

Justin McBrayer, associate professor of philosophy

 

McBrayer plans on going to the University of Innsbruck in Austria to research and teach, he said.

 

The research he will be conducting is on the philosophical implications of scientific studies of religion, McBrayer said.

 

In particular, the cognitive science of religion, which is the process of studying people's brains trying to figure out the explanations behind why they have their religious beliefs or their religious practices, he said.

 

“I am going to be looking at those studies at that data from the point of view of a philosopher trying to figure out whether those studies give us any reason to be skeptical of our religious beliefs or endorse our religious beliefs,” McBrayer said.

 

For McBrayer’s research he needed to talk with people who are doing research on this particular area, he said.

 

“This is really good for me because I get to go to a thriving department that’s really good at this particular kind of thing and it’s a way for me to get my research off the ground,” McBrayer said.

 

For FLC this will allow McBrayer to teach a course on this new, cutting-edge material, something that is not being done right now on campus, he said.

 

All of fall term McBrayer will be in Austria, but will not return to FLC until fall 2017, he said.

 

Ross McCauley, associate professor of biology   

 

McCauley is going to Ecuador and in particular to be going to the Galapagos Islands, he said.

 

The Galapagos Islands are a set of volcanic mountains that are particularly famous for one of the main places where Charles Darwin traveled and worked to develop his theory of evolution, McCauley said.

 

Most of the plant species there are endemic and have very interesting patterns of evolution, he said.

 

McCauley is traveling out to the islands and traveling around the different islands to collect these species of plants, he said.

 

He will then try to understand their patterns of evolution speciation, McCauley said.

 

For the first two months of the Fulbright grant, McCauley will be out working in the island collecting specimens, and then for the rest of the time will be back in the city of Quito, he said.

 

McCauley will be working with a collaborator at the University of San Francisco de Quito, where they will be analyzing those specimens and working with students, he said.

 

One of the benefits for FLC students is that he will be continuing with research on some questions that he will to be addressing on his own, McCauley said.

 

He plans on giving students doing senior research and independent studies the chance to work with him on his research, he said.

 

It will also affect what McCauley teaches.

 

Professors tend to teach best if they have direct relationships what they are teaching, he said.

 

McCauley will be starting back to FLC fall 2017, he said.

 

“I think it’s a neat thing that we've got three faculty members getting a Fulbright Award,” McCauley said. “It’s an extremely prestigious award, that is actually very competitive and we are a really small school to be able to have three people within one year grant cycle. That's pretty amazing for a place our size.”