Four College Of Arts And Sciences Faculty Receive Fulbright Scholarships

The College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University is pleased to announce that four faculty members have received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award for the 2022-2023 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Christian Brannstrom, a professor in the Department of Geography; Daniel Conway, a professor in the Department of Philosophy; Eduardo Espina, a professor of Hispanic studies in the Department of Global Languages and Cultures; and Mikko Tuhkanen, a professor in the Department of English, are among the 800 U.S. citizens who will conduct research or teach abroad through the program.

“The Fulbright Scholar Program allows our faculty to engage in international collaborations in both teaching and research,” said Mark Zoran, executive associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of biology. “These awardees have been selected by their respective host countries and are excellent ambassadors for Texas A&M and for the United States.

“The College of Arts and Sciences recognizes the importance of our scholars and teachers sharing their knowledge and expertise across borders and around the world. We are proud of our Fulbright Scholars, and we look forward to seeing the results of their scholarly work.”

Brannstrom, who also serves as senior associate dean for undergraduate education in Texas A&M Arts and Sciences, was awarded his Fulbright to begin a three-month teaching and research program at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, where he will be teaching in the Departamento de Geografía’s Laboratorio de Estudios Socioterritoriales in collaboration with Raquel Alvarado. His instruction will consist of a geography of energy curriculum with connection to the Uruguayan context.

Brannstrom’s goal is to better understand the social acceptance of Uruguay’s wind energy expansion through rigorous research design that advances the growing energy justice literature.

“I'm honored to receive this award,” Brannstrom said. “It lets me do three things that I'm passionate about: I have studied social acceptance of wind farms in Texas and Brazil since 2010; I have taught Geography of Energy since 2009; and I've enjoyed studying Spanish ever since my first exposure at age 15. Uruguay has had amazing success in implementing wind energy, but the social acceptance aspects remain poorly understood. I'm grateful for any opportunity to teach and research in a place that allows me to collect additional data that broaden our understandings of social aspects of renewable energy.”

Conway will be a visiting research fellow at Deakin University in Australia studying the efforts of local scholars and practitioners to make social and spiritual reparations to the First Nation peoples and indigenous communities. Conway’s research is meant to shape his understanding of the psychological and social conditions of genocide and related crimes against humanity. He is particularly interested in how reparations for genocidal violence might be understood to be consistent with the more familiar political goals and aspirations of modern nation states.

“I am honored to receive this prestigious award, and I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues in Australia,” Conway said. “I am deeply grateful to Texas A&M for its ongoing support of my teaching and research."

Espina is spending the fall semester until the end of December in Paraguay, writing a book on the changing notions regarding innovation, originality, novelty, and anticanonical writing in the context of 21st century Hispanic American poetry. He will also be giving two seminars on “New Writings of the Americas” and “Imagination to power: inventive writing; syntax and repercussions”, at the Centro Cultural de España and at the Universidad Autónoma de Asunción, respectively, for university students in the capital city of Asuncion.

“A few years ago, the Fulbright Commission invited me to apply in the main category and suggested I do research and teach in Paraguay, a country in which I have never been,” Espina said. “Two years ago, after thinking it over, I applied. However, after passing all the academic filters and the committee telling me that my project was very good, they informed me that I had not been selected. However, I did not see this rejection as the end, but instead, an invitation to apply again. So, I did the same tedious and tiring process again, but this time I won. I won the Guggenheim fellowship on the first try, this one took me a little longer. Persistence is key.”

Tuhkanen will be teaching classes in American literature and literary theory at the University of Bergen in Norway. He also plans to pursue two interrelated, book-length studies titled “Time’s Witness: On James Baldwin” and “Diasporic Modernities: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Sylvia Wynter” for the coming academic year.

“As a Fulbright recipient, I’m excited to be able to network with colleagues internationally for the coming academic year,” Tuhkanen said. “I’m also happy to be a little closer, for a little while, to Finland, my site of origin.”

Learn more about faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences.