Three
“It’s quite the honor for such a small school to have three Fulbright Scholars,” FLC Board of Trustees member Tom Schilling said.
Justin McBrayer, associate professor of philosophy, is headed to Innsbruck, Austria, to research the origins and rationality of religious beliefs.
“I’ll be looking at empirical evidence, evolutionary biology and the cognitive science of biology,” he said. “I’ll be teaching the same topic to graduate students at the University of Innsbruck, and they’re going to be guinea pigs, thinking through interesting issues with me.”
The Fulbright Scholar program is run by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It offers opportunities to research and teach in more than 125 countries, and is open not only to college and university faculty but for other professionals including artists, journalists, scientists, lawyers and independent scholars. The award is accompanied by funding for travel and living expenses to make a foreign stay economically feasible.
McBrayer’s family will join him in Austria thanks to the Fulbright stipend. His wife, Anna, is a computer designer who does much of her work for FLC remotely, and sons Patrick, 11, and Aeneas, 9, will attend language school in the mornings and be home-schooled the remainder of the day.
“We’ll keep on plugging away at life,” McBrayer said, “we’ll just be in a different country.”
One priority is continuing with their children’s music training, particularly for Patrick, who is a composer.
“We’re talking about the land of Mozart and Beethoven,” Justin McBrayer said. “I’m sure we can find an instructor who speaks English to teach.”
McBrayer had already been granted a year-long sabbatical from the college when his Fulbright was announced. He will teach and do research with the Fulbright for the fall semester, then spend the rest of the sabbatical pulling together the research and working on a book project related to what he finds.
“I may need more grant money for that,” he said with a laugh.
Ross McCauley, associate professor of biology, will be studying the evolution of plants in the Galápagos Islands National Park and in Quito, Ecuador.
“The idea for this project was born when I was working on my Ph.D.,” he said, “I was doing research with this particular plant group in North and South America, and there were five species that were only found in the Galápagos. But it was way too difficult and expensive for a graduate student.”
He decided it would be a future project, and it came to mind as he was preparing his Fulbright proposal. After spending three and a half years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, working in Latin America and in Spanish don’t phase him, he said, and a Fulbright opens doors to collaborators.
“No one has worked on this, and we’re trying to establish a baseline of knowledge,” said McCauley, who will spend his first two months at a small research station in the islands and the remaining four months in Quito doing lab work at a university. “The islands have every kind of climate, wet, dry, higher and lower elevations, and it’s such a unique environment, it should help us to understand how does an evolutionary pattern actually work?”
McCauley’s family will join him on the adventure, which isn’t scheduled to start until January.
McCauley is still working on permits and getting additional grant money for the lab work required.
Nancy Cardona, associate professor of English, will enjoy a different kind of Fulbright grant, as a roving scholar in American studies sponsored by the Norwegian government’s Center for Language and Culture.
She’s taking on a formidable goal: teaching students and teachers about an America that doesn’t show up in the movies.
“I’m interested in the different perspectives of how we are seen in the world,” Cardona said. “I’ve been told we tend to assume they know things they don’t. And I’m interested in how my own assumptions are interrogated by people outside the U.S.”
Cardona, whose special interests include African-American and Chicano/a literature and literature by women of color, will travel to Norway teaching in classrooms and providing professional development for teachers at the secondary level. She will take the opportunity to share her love of the literature and experience of people of color, she said.
“I was asked to give a sample of a topic for a workshop and a syllabus for it,” she said. “I picked Manifest Destiny, which has been in the news. So I’ll share a diary of Sioux writer Zitkala-Sa and will show some of an episode of ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ Because there’s no doubt the understanding is complicated by the Hollywood notion of the U.S.”
Unlike McBrayer’s and McCauley’s Fulbrights, Cardona’s will last for a year. Hers is also a rarity in that it is sponsored by the host country and not the U.S. Department of State.
abutler@durangoherald.com
