On the Look Out for Future Fulbright Scholars

Cal State Fullerton Has Seen Its Share of Students and Faculty Receiving the Honor

April 1, 2008
by Pamela McLaren

Jochen Burgtorf, associate professor of history and Fulbright Scholar student adviser, calls the Fulbright Scholars Program “One of the most prestigious study-abroad programs.

“It’s truly international, offering study opportunities in a vast array of countries.”

Sponsored by the State Department, the Fulbright Program offers opportunities for recent graduates, postgraduate candidates, developing professionals and artists to conduct career-launching study and research abroad. Faculty members can study and lecture under the traditional program or in three other programs: senior specialists, distinguished chairs and the international education administrators program.

Cal State Fullerton has had its fair share of both faculty members and students who have been named to this select group.

Christine Brackett, who completed her master of public health degree in 2007 spent 10-months in Rwanda working to find ways to help Rwandans keep their infants alive and healthy. A year earlier, Andrea C. Cano, who completed her master’s degree in education, taught English at a university in Chile.

In 2004, Sylvie Widjaja traveled to Singapore, where she examined that country’s role and its relationship with the United States in the war on terrorism, while graduate student Trangdai Tranguyen was at Stockholm University studying the Vietnamese immigrant community in Sweden.

Faculty Fulbright Scholars have been equally diverse.

Last year, Denise Stanley, associate professor of economics, conducted research and taught in Honduras, and political science professor Yuan Ting spent a semester at South China University of Technology; Tony Fellow, chair and professor of communications, served as lecturer and Vercelli Chair at the University of Piemonte in Milan in 2006; in 2005, Stan Breckenridge, lecturer in Afro-ethnic studies, shared his expertise in African American musicology with students at Marie Curie Sklodowska University in southeast Poland during the fall semester and Irena Praitis, associate professor of English, comparative literature and linguistics, spent the spring semester in Lithuana, teaching American literature to students at Vilnius Pedagogical University; Michael Steiner, professor of American studies — and a two-time Fulbright scholar — traveled to Poland in 2003; and the late Donald Castro, adviser to President Milton A. Gordon worked at Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training and lectured at several universities that same year.