Two scholars from Canada will conduct research and participate in academic exchange at Vanderbilt in 2014-15 as part of the Fulbright Scholarship Program.
Michele Orsini, director of the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies and associate professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, has been appointed a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair. These are targeted opportunities that enable prominent and promising scholars and experienced professionals to conduct research and guest lecture at select American and Canadian partner universities and research centers.
Orsini is interested in critical approaches to public policy and the role of civil society actors in policy processes. His research will explore the role of emotions and stigma in a range of contested policy fields, including obesity and harm reduction. He also is examining the impact of criminalization of HIV non-disclosure on AIDS service organizations.
His work has appeared in Policy and Society, Social Policy and Administration, the Canadian Journal of Political Science and Social and Legal Studies, among others. He recently co-edited Worlds of Autism: Across the Spectrum of Neurological Difference (University of Minneosta Press, 2013) and Critical Policy Studies (University of British Columbia Press, 2007).
Norman Nehmetallah, who is entering his third and final year at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, comes to Vanderbilt as a Killam Fellow. The Killam Fellowships Program allows undergraduate students from Canada and the United States to participate in a program of binational residential exchange.
Nehmetallah is pursuing an honors degree in English literature at Mount Allison University and will study in the Department of English at Vanderbilt. His poetry has twice been published in Seven Mondays, a journal of undergraduate art at Mount Allison. He also has self-published a collaborative broadside titled Dimensions of Exhaustion.
Nehmetallah’s academic interests include poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. He is primarily interested in modern and postmodern poetry of the United States and Canada, with a particular enthusiasm for the literature of the Southern United States and Southern Ontario, respectively. He concentrates on how borders, both literal and figurative, factor into literature.
The Fulbright scholarship program was created to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries through educational and cultural exchange. The program was conceived by Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright.