Congratulations to our CLACS Fulbright Scholarship Recipients!
June 18, 2018
This year, twenty-nine seniors, two recent graduates and four graduate students from Brown have received prestigious Fulbright awards to teach, study or conduct research abroad during the 2018-19 academic year. Among them are our very own CLACS Undergraduate Fellows and recent graduates Margot Cohen, Amalia Perez, and Nicole Ubinas, and CLACS-affiliated graduate student Watufani Poe!
Over the past summer and winter break, Margot Cohen '18 was awarded the CLACS Undergraduate Research Award to travel to Santiago, Chile to conduct fieldwork for her honors thesis project focusing on the issue of femicide or feminicide, when women are killed because of their gender, and how these deaths are related to other forms of structural and cultural violence that women around the world experience every day. With her Fulbright Scholarship, Margot will continue her work in the field of women’s rights and gender-based violence post-grad with a similar research project next year in Quito, Ecuador.
Nicole Ubinas '18 was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow concentrating in Africana Studies and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship aims to increase the number of individuals from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and others with a demonstrated commitment to eradicating racial disparities, who pursue a Ph.D. in their respective field. She received a Fulbright scholarship to continue her research in the Dominican Republic in the 2018-2019 school year.
Amalia Perez '18 concentrated in Political Science and Latin American and Caribbean Studies during her undergrad at Brown. Her interests in international development, immigration, and the political economy and development of Latin America have led her to pursue an internship at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) office in Buenos Aires, as well as an independent study in Ecuador with the Cofan Brown Student Alliance, a student organization she helped to form, aimed at learning about the Cofan people and their history and stories of resistance. Most recently she found work as a detention project assistant at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) in Chicago, Illinois, which provides free legal support for immigrants who, by virtue of their non-citizen status, are not entitled to a public defender. Her Fulbright scholarship will allow her to work and teach in Bogotá, Colombia in the coming year, where she plans to help resettle Venezuelan refugees and will teach English at the Universidad Nacional.
Watufani Poe will be entering his fourth year as an Africana studies Ph.D. candidate at Brown this fall. Watufani spent two years in the San Francisco Bay Area as an Americorps member, working with various LGBTQ activist organizations whose main goals were to educate and to promote youth activism, especially among youth of color. His research interests include the African diaspora in Latin America, Brazil's Black social and political movements, Black queer theory, Black Transnationalism, and intersectionality. He will use his Fulbright award to research black LGBTQ activism and community-building in Brazil — the focus of his dissertation.
We are all very proud of our CLACS students and their successes, and we wish them the best of luck in their research ahead! To read more about Brown's Fulbright scholars, please visit https://news.brown.edu/articles/2018/06/fulbright.