Professors Honored With Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grants

Four University of Pittsburgh faculty members have been selected for 2013-14 Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar grants.

Administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, on behalf of the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is the flagship international educational-exchange effort sponsored by the U.S. government.

The program provides teaching and/or research opportunities to U.S. faculty and experienced professionals in a wide variety of academic and professional fields.

Pitt’s latest Core Fulbright Scholar grant recipients are:

Susan Andrade, a professor of English in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, who has been awarded a Senior Scholar Fulbright-Nehru Award at Christ University in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, from January to May 2014.

Jonathan Arac, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English in the Dietrich School, who has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant for American Studies at the University of Naples L’Orientale in Naples, Italy, from March to June 2014.

Peter Brusilovsky, a professor and chair of the Information Science and Technology Program in the School of Information Sciences, who has been awarded a Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies at the University of Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland, through the end of November 2013 and again from April to June 2014.

Valerian E. Kagan, a professor and vice chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health in the Graduate School of Public Health, who has been awarded a Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair in Science and the Environment at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, which he will complete by the end of next month.

“These grants reflect the great work being done by our faculty and the strong emphasis that we put on international research and education at Pitt,” said Pitt Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Patricia E. Beeson. “I am confident that the research projects that Professors Andrade, Arac, Brusilovsky, and Kagan will be pursuing with their grants—literature, online learning, and public health—will make significant contributions to the Fulbright program’s mission of increasing mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”

While in India, Susan Andrade will continue her research of realism theory in contemporary Indian and African literature. Andrade is the author of The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988 (Duke University Press, 2011), which focuses on Africa’s first post-independence generation of novelists. She was a coeditor for the book Atlantic Cross-Currents/Transatlantiques (Africa World Press, 2001) and, in 2008, served as a guest editor for a special issue on comparative African fiction that was published in NOVEL, the Society for Novel Studies’ journal. Andrade also serves on the editorial board of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature as well as Research in African Literatures.

In Italy, Jonathan Arac will work to complete his nonfiction book, tentatively titled, The Age of the Novel in the United States, 1850-1950. He also will teach a course on the history of the American novel, which will closely examine Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Arac, who also is director of Pitt’s Humanities Center, is the author of four books analyzing American and British fiction, poetry, and social criticism. He has edited six volumes of essays on literary criticism and theory. His primary areas of research and expertise are U.S. literature and culture since 1820 and British literature and culture from 1740-1940.

Peter Brusilovsky’s research in Helsinki focuses on creating online learning tools for teaching computer and information sciences. He is working with research teams at three Finnish institutions—Aalto University, University of Helsinki, and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

Brusilovsky’s areas of research and expertise focus on artificial intelligence, human/computer interaction, and web-based education technology. A professor at Pitt since 2000, Brusilovsky also has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, the Tokyo Denki University, and the National College of Ireland in Dublin, among other internationally renowned institutions.

Valerian E. Kagan’s Fulbright research focuses on developing substances to help the human body mitigate the effects of harmful radiation levels. The substances could potentially be used in response to incidents such as “dirty” bomb attacks or nuclear power plant failures, and they could also be useful in radiation therapy during cancer treatment. Kagan studies free-radical biochemistry. In addition to his work at Pitt, he has taught and conducted research at Karolinska Institute in Sweden, King’s College in London, the Russian State Medical University in Moscow, the Taipei Medical University in Taiwan, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Established in 1946 by Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Annually, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program sends about 800 American professionals to 155 countries to lecture, research, and participate in a range of endeavors.