UB Professor Named to Fulbright Chair At University of Pisa

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Michael Frisch, Ph.D., professor of history and chair of the Department of American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has been named to fill the newly created Fulbright Chair in American Studies at the Instituto di Storia, University of Pisa (Italy) for the 1992 spring term.

His responsibilities will include lectures on contemporary American history at the introductory or advanced undergraduate level, with emphasis on the history of relations between the U.S. and Europe; advisement to students working on doctoral dissertations, and guest lectures at other Italian universities.

Frisch is the third UB faculty member since 1984 to hold a Fulbright European chair. The thers were Robert Creeley, Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and Humanities, who held the Bicentennial Chair in American Studies in Finland in 1988-89, and Murray Brown, professor of economics, who held the Siena Chair in Economics in 1986-87.

The Fulbright European Chair awards are considered among the most prestigious appointments in the Fulbright program worldwide, requiring that recipients have a prominent record of scholarly accomplishment.

Frisch has been a member of the UB faculty since 1969. During that time he has served as a Senior Fulbright-Hayes Lecturer in American Studies at three Korean universities, and from 1979-81 was a research professor in the School of Public and Urban Policy, University of Pennsylvania.

He has held a number of other grant-supported positions including fellowships at Princeton University, Harvard University and Alfred University; and in 1985 received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a director of the New York State Council for the Humanities and has served as a consultant for a number of projects, including exhibitions, programs and films, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

He has published widely and made more than 100 scholarly presentations on topics related to 19th and 20th century American urban and oral history and is on the editorial board of a number of several history journals. Frisch edits Oral History Review, the journal of the Oral History Association, and has published three books in the field, the most recent of which is A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (SUNY Press, 1990).

He is a graduate of Tufts University and holds a master's degree and doctorate from Princeton University. He was a member of the Princeton faculty before coming to UB.