Three Syracuse University faculty members have been awarded prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowships to teach and conduct research abroad.
The awardees are:
They are among 400 faculty and professionals awarded Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program fellowships to work in more than 135 countries in the coming year.
Harriet Brown
Brown, who is also a longtime magazine writer and author of several nonfiction books, plans to travel to Israel in the spring to continue her research and reporting about families whose children use medically prescribed cannabis to treat health issues such as seizures, cancer and autism spectrum disorder. She wants to learn more about the cutting-edge research taking place there and connect to the strong network of parents who advocate for medically prescribed cannabis to treat their children’s conditions. She will also teach a course on how to report and write accurately on scientific topics at the University of Haifa.
In addition to research contacts, Brown believes that it is important for Americans to maintain academic, citizen and government connections with Israel, given the call by some to sever all ties in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. She says that, as a Jewish academic on an American campus, she has been negatively affected by that perspective. “Change doesn’t come from simply shutting people down,” Brown says. “Part of the reason I want to do this is because I feel like maybe I can build some bridges and dispel some myths about life in Israel. I feel strongly that there is a need for those connections, especially for academic ones.”
Robin McCrary
McCrary will visit the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, in the spring to teach and conduct research about how public health humanities education can help close trust gaps between health care practitioners and marginalized patients and populations. He hopes interactions with faculty, students and health care professionals in a different country with a different health care system will enhance how he teaches health humanities to Syracuse student who are preparing for careers in health care and medicine.
He will also teach Cross-Cultural Care Traditions, a course designed to improve two-way dialogue between patients and providers by exploring how different cultures understand and influence health care and illness, including differing attitudes toward medical treatment, varying perceptions on living and dying, Indigenous and non-Western forms of care and diverse spiritualities. He aims to help students better understand the disability, minority, non-Western, gender identity and sexual-orientation contexts patients bring to their health care provider interactions.
Volunteering with immigrant, newcomer and refugee populations in Syracuse has helped McCrary formulate the course content, he says. “Given their different backgrounds, those groups have provided me with insight regarding the context of how they understand care traditions. For those entering the health professions, I believe it’s not just about what our students can learn but also how they bring themselves to the contexts of the care that they provide patients.”
Amy Murphy
Murphy will be in the Slovak Republic from September through January 2025 to research how the communist government’s suppression of literature during its 40-year rule impacted Slovak society and citizens.
Her research will include looking at the underground movement that helped Slovak people obtain literature and maintain high literacy levels during that time. She will work with faculty at Comenius University and speak with students, faculty and families to understand how Slovak citizens maintained literacy and continued to access information at a time when it was dangerous to do so. “We take for granted the educational freedoms we have here, but the people who were part of that movement could have gone to jail for helping others obtain information at that time,” Murphy says. She will also teach a course for students who plan to become teachers of English or translators. The art writing course has a broad cultural component, and she wants to see how students interpret various aspects of American culture.
Murphy applied for the fellowship after learning that her great-grandfather, who came to the U.S. at age 15 to mine coal and silver in Colorado, was from Slovakia, and not Austria, as her family had always thought. “I wanted to understand his story, more about the people who stayed there and the whole underground literature movement. It is part of what has helped that country maintain a very high level of literacy,” she says.
