Three College of Arts and Sciences professors are among the 400 faculty and professionals in the U.S. who have been awarded highly selective Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program fellowships to work in more than 135 countries in the coming year. Stefano Giannini, associate professor of Italian in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, and Robin McCrary and Amy C. Murphy, professors in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, will travel abroad to teach and conduct research in Egypt, Canada and Slovakia, respectively.

Nostalgia in Egyptian-Italian Literature

Giannini will travel to Egypt in Spring 2025 to conduct research on Italian authors who lived there, and the literature they produced during the first half of the 20th century. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Italy saw one of its largest periods of emigration, as millions of Italians fled their home country in search of more opportunity. Among the countries that experienced a surge in Italian immigrants was Egypt. Through this research project, Giannini will explore how the Egyptian environment shaped Italian authors’ reflections on nostalgia and exile.

“Far from Italy, they longed for their country,” says Giannini. “If they moved back to Italy, they longed for Egypt as they carried something from another country with them. Their work is a testament to the possibility of enriching dialogues across cultures.”

This project will build on Giannini's previous research about prominent authors such as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Fausta Cialente and Enrico Pea, each of whom spent time living in both Italy and Egypt. Giannini will compile his research into a monograph. He will also share these insights into the human experience and Italian authors' encounters with exile and migration with his students at Syracuse.

“Nostalgia is a complex and pervasive emotion that touches us all: those who travel and those who stay,” says Giannini. “I believe that as human beings we want to know more about such a feeling, because it means to know more about us.”

Studying Canadian Health Care

McCrary will visit the University of Waterloo in Spring 2025 to teach and engage in research on how public health humanities education can help close trust gaps between health care practitioners and marginalized patients and populations. He hopes interactions with faculty, students and health care professionals in a different country with a different health care system will enhance how he teaches health humanities to Syracuse students who are preparing for careers in health care and medicine.

McCrary will also teach Cross-Cultural Care Traditions, a course designed to improve two-way dialogue between patients and providers. He aims to help students better understand the disability, minority, non- Western, gender identity and sexual-orientation contexts patients bring to their health care provider interactions.

“For those entering the health professions, I believe it’s not just about what our students can learn but also how they bring themselves to the contexts of the care that they provide patients,” says McCrary.

Literacy Under a Dictatorship

During Fall 2024, Murphy is researching and teaching at Comenius University located in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her project involves a deep exploration into how that region’s political history has affected literacy. She is connecting with students, faculty and their families to document their experiences with language, literature and education to examine how Slovaks in former Czechoslovakia expressed themselves artistically despite the difficulties and potential dangers they had in obtaining texts while under an authoritarian communist rule.

“When I was in college in the late 1980s, people my age in Slovakia couldn’t read the literary texts that I could because they were banned,” says Murphy, who applied for the fellowship after learning that her great-grandfather, who came to the U.S. at age 15, was from Slovakia, and not Austria, as her family had always thought. “I’m interested in my generation—people that were born in the 60s and 70s – and want to explore how literacy worked in a former dictatorship in terms of access to materials and how that affected people’s ability to read and think.”

Murphy looks forward to sharing the cross-cultural teaching and research insights she gains during her time abroad with students in her classes and faculty at Syracuse University.

Portions of this article have been adapted from an SU News article by Diane Stirling.