Fulbright Specialist Program

Eileen Angelini is a recipient of a 2010-2011 Canada-U.S. Fulbright award as a Visiting Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. She was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in August 2011. Eileen received her B.A. in French from Middlebury College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in French Studies from Brown University. Named to the 2013-2017 Fulbright Specialist Roster, she was the Grantee for “Francophone Culture: Literature, Pedagogy, and Additional Language Acquisition” at the University of Manitoba, Canada.

Presently, Eileen is the associate dean of the School for Graduate Studies at SUNY Empire State College, where she leads the academic operations and serves on the Presidential Task Force to Enhance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. For the 2018-2019 academic year, Eileen was the Whichard Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at East Carolina University. Immediately prior, she was a researcher and teacher for the Bureau of Jewish Education in Getzville, New York where she utilized her background in researching Jewish-Christian relations to teach the Holocaust from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Eileen’s research in Canadian Studies with a focus on the Francophone regions of Canada and their respective ties to the United States has taken on increased meaning since having been a Fulbright Scholar and Fulbright Specialist. She was delighted to return to Winnipeg in January and February 2017 with a short-term fellowship from the University of Winnipeg to conduct research with faculty in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

Ricia Chansky is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and the director of the university’s new Oral History Lab, funded through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Her public humanities projects “Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane” and “Sheltered in Place” have won recognitions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Modern Language Association, the Oral History Association, and Voice of Witness, a non-profit dedicated to amplifying life stories to create social justice.

Ricia is a faculty fellow with the Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers University, working on the “Climates of Inequality and the COVID Crisis” project and at the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico, in collaboration with UPR-Río Piedras, Michigan State University, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean. She is also a research fellow at the York University Centre for Research in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Brown University Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies.

Her recent and forthcoming publications include “Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico” (Haymarket Books, 2021); the children’s book “Maxy Survives the Hurricane/Maxy sobrevive el huracán” (Arte Público Press, 2021); and “The Divided States: Unraveling National Identity in the Twenty-First Century” (University of Wisconsin, 2022).

She was recently recognized by the Museum of Tolerance/Simon Wiesenthal Center as a global climate justice leader for her work on the “Mi María” project.

Pablo Gil has focused on various aspects in his creative and professional career: jazz performance, composition, arrangement, production, music for theatre, movies, and documentaries, and conducting. He is the founder and director of Raices Jazz Orchestra, a Grammy-winning large jazz ensemble dedicated to the exploration of the Latinx musical heritage, recently featured on PBS’s Great Performances series.

Pablo was an associate professor at the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Musical and later at the Universidad Nacional de Experimental de las Artes in Caracas. In these roles, he conducted jazz ensembles and taught woodwind performance and improvisation. He also worked with Venezuela’s famed Youth Orchestra System, known as “El Sistema,” conducting jazz ensembles there as well.

Pablo is an alumnus of the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program, during which he helped found the first Bachelor of Arts program in Jazz at the Universidad de Los Andes in Merida, Venezuela.

Pablo obtained his performance degree from the Conservatoire National de Region de Paris, Master of Jazz Performance from City College of New York, and Master of Composition from the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas. He also holds a Doctorate in Jazz Studies from the University of Miami.

Irma McClaurin is an academic, entrepreneur, award-winning writer, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility and Inclusion champion, and principal of Irma McClaurin Solutions (IMS). She is also the founder of the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive at the University of Massachusetts Amherst which was established to preserve the contributions of Black women. Her book, Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics is Choice Magazine’s “Outstanding Academic Title.” In 2015, the Black Press of America selected Irma as “Best in the Nation Columnist.” Her latest book, JustSpeak: Reflections on Race, Culture and Politics in America, is forthcoming in 2022.

An activist and anthropologist, Irma studies the social construction of inequality in the African Diaspora and is a fierce supporter of cultural heritage preservation. She worked on the preservation of the historic African American Oberlin Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 2021, she received the American Anthropological Association’s Engaged Anthropology Award for working as DEI consultant and lead anthropologist on the Rochester Museum and Science Center’s groundbreaking exhibition, “The Changemakers: Rochester Women Who Changed the World.”

She holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in cultural anthropology, with a subfield in historical archaeology, and the M.F.A. degree in English, specializing in poetry, all from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her B.A. degree is in American Studies from Grinnell College. As a 2018 Fulbright Specialist, Irma taught “Black Feminist and Feminist Theory from an American Perspective,” lectured on the Black Feminist Archive, and taught public writing workshops in Kerala, India.