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Largest number of UB students in recent memory win Fulbright grants

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By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Published: June 23, 2011

UB has produced eight Fulbright student finalists for the 2011-12 academic year and, to date, four have received cultural exchange grants and one has received a teaching assistantship grant to study and/or teach in Europe, Africa, South America and Canada.

Sasha Pack, associate professor of history, and faculty adviser for the UB Fulbright Program since 2009, calls this “the largest number of student recipients of Fulbright grants from UB in recent memory, and certainly the largest number since I’ve been advising the program.”

Pack says UB has excellent candidates every year, but calls the application process”"rigorous,” noting that it requires applicants to write a description of their academic interests and accomplishments that is clear to someone outside their field, while at the same time establishing expertise in their particular academic specialty.

“Last summer, we did something different,” Pack says.

“We established a summer program for the Fulbright applicants, during which they exchanged application essays and critiqued one another’s submissions for clarity and effectiveness. It is important, after all,” he says, “to convey expertise in a particular discipline in a way that is clear and comprehensible to those not in that field of study.

“The students said they thought it was very helpful and perhaps the proof is in their success.”

The Fulbright recipients to date are:

  • Justin Parks, a PhD candidate in the Department of English, whose work focuses on modernist poetry in the context of the liberal-democratic state. Parks received a Fulbright grant to conduct research at the University of Turku, Finland, during the 2011-12 academic year.
  • Joseph Lake, a PhD student in the Department of Music, who received a Fulbright Study Scholarship in the Creative and Performing Arts to fund a full academic year of work in music composition at the Carl Maria von Weber Hochschule für Musik in Dresden, Germany, where he will compose a piece for orchestra to be premiered by the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra.
  • Brian McSherry, who received his bachelor of fine arts degree in communications design from the Department of Visual Studies this spring, received a Fulbright Canada grant to fund his studies in graphic design at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, from September 2011 through May 2012.
  • Rachel Hoorwitz a December 2010 graduate of UB with a double major in English and French, received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to teach at a university in Morocco for the 2011-12 academic year.
  • Melissa Schindler, who studies diaspora literatures, is scheduled to receive a PhD in English from UB in 2013. She received a Fulbright to study the African diaspora from March to December 2012 at Brazil’s Universidade Federal in São João del-Rei, a historical city in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. More enslaved Africans were sent to Brazil during the Atlantic slave trade than to any other nation in the Western Hemisphere, and many of them were shipped to Minas Gerais to work in the gold mines. Subsequently, many thousands of Brazilians emigrated to the U.S. from Minas Gerais, more than from any other place in the country.