Campus Colleagues: Vessela Vassileva-Clarke
UM-Dearborn’s director of research development talks about what’s driving the university’s burgeoning research culture and why she almost became a diplomat....
UM-Dearborn has been named a top producer of Fulbright U.S. Scholars.
The exchange program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, awarded multiple grants to UM-Dearborn faculty in the 2019-2020 cycle. The rankings lists UM-Dearborn as a master’s institution.
Three College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters faculty and one lecturer in the English Language Proficiency Program are teaching and conducting research in three different areas of the world — Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe — through the international program.
“These are incredibly competitive and prestigious awards and to have three faculty named as Fulbright recipients in a single cycle is extraordinary,” says CASL Dean Marty Hershock. “Our students are taught by faculty members who are not just part of the conversation. On the contrary, their work is a topic of conversation around the globe.”
Linguistics Professor Daniel Davis is in the Philippines partnering with Ateneo de Manila University. Davis is studying how people in the Philippines use English — specifically looking at the language’s influence in culture and the culture’s influence on the language
Composition and Rhetoric Professor Bill DeGenaro is in Jordan working with Al-Zaytoonah University and additional institutions to develop faculty workshops and higher-education curriculum on teaching writing to multilingual learners.
Anna Muller, history associate professor and the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professor in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies, is in northwestern Poland to write a history of that region and the impacts of changes — both in place and mindset — on Polish villages in the second half of the 20th century. To do this, she’ll combine ethnographic fieldwork, oral history interviews and archival research.
English Language Proficiency Program lecturer and CEHHS alumna Amira Shourbaji is in Bahrain leading English-language classrooms at the country’s main teacher’s college and studying curriculum theories, language arts, and multicultural education.
