Four Pitt Professors Honored With Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grants

PITTSBURGH—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 Fulbright 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 2013-14 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. 

* 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. 

* Peter Brusilovsky, a professor and chair of the Information Science & 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. 

* 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 Environmental Studies at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. 

“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.”

Susan Andrade will conduct her Fulbright research at Christ University from January to May 2014. While in India, she will conduct classwork and research into the concept 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 the work of Africa’s first post-independence generation of novelists. She also served as a coeditor for the book Atlantic Cross-Currents/Transatlantiques (Africa World Press, 2001) and guest-edited a special issue on comparative African fiction for the journal NOVEL in 2008. 

As a Pitt professor, Andrade has been involved in numerous efforts to better inform Pittsburgh’s student populations about the literary arts. In 2011, she organized a conference at Pitt on English-speaking Asian novels as well as a realism seminar at Carnegie Mellon University during the 2008-09 academic year. 

Andrade is a specialist reader in postcolonial studies for the advisory committee of the PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America. She also serves on the editorial board of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature as well as Research in African Literatures, widely considered the premier journal of African literary studies worldwide. 

Jonathan Arac will conduct his Fulbright research at the University of Naples L’Orientale from March to June 2014. While in Naples, he will work towards the completion of his nonfiction book, tentatively titled, The Age of the Novel in the United States, 1850-1950. Those four months, spent embedded in a foreign culture alongside faculty and students whose native languages are not English, will provide Arac with a fresh perspective towards the book’s research. 

In addition, Arac will teach a related course on the history of the American novel, which will closely examine Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (Harper & Brothers, 1851). 

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

Prior to coming to Pitt in 2006, Arac served as the Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. During a career in higher education spanning more than 40 years, he also has held faculty positions at Duke University, Princeton University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition, Arac has held prominent visiting professorship positions at Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, and the University of Oxford. Arac earned his BA, MA, and PhD degrees at Harvard University. 

Peter Brusilovsky is focusing his Fulbright research on creating online learning tools for teaching computer and information sciences. He is working with research teams at three Finnish institutions—Aalto University, Helsinki University, and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. He is conducting the first of two Fulbright research sessions through the end of November 2013; the second session will take place from April to June 2014.

Brusilovsky’s areas of research and expertise focus on topics related to 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. 

Brusilovsky’s awards and distinctions include a Dr. Honoris Causa degree from the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2009, as well as the E.T.S. Walton Visitor Award from the Science Foundation of Ireland in 2006. His work has received funding from such notable organizations as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of U.S. Naval Research. Brusilovsky is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.  

Brusilovsky earned BS and MS degrees in applied mathematics as well as a PhD degree in computer science at Moscow State University. 

Valerian E. Kagan is conducting his Fulbright research at McMaster University, through the end of December 2013. While in Canada, he will continue his research into developing substances that would assist the human body in mitigating the effects of harmful levels of radiation. The substances would potentially be used in incidents such as a “dirty” bomb attack or a nuclear power plant failure; they could also be useful in radiation therapy during cancer treatment. 

Kagan’s areas of research and expertise pertain to free radical biochemistry. In addition to Pitt, he has taught and conducted research at such notable international institutions as Karolinska Institute in Sweden, King’s College in London, the Russian State Medical University in Moscow, the Taipei Medical University in China, and the University of California at Berkeley. Kagan is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a member of the American Society of Toxicology and the International Society for Free Radical Research.

Kagan earned BS, MS, and PhD degrees in biochemistry and biophysics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. He also earned a Doctor of Science degree in biochemistry and biophysics at the USSR Academy of Sciences. 

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 approximately 800 American professionals to 155 countries to lecture, research, and participate in a range of endeavors. 

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