UC Santa Barbara Fulbright Scholars to Study in Europe, Mexico

Two faculty members at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been awarded Fulbright fellowships to study in Europe and Mexico during the 2007-08 academic year.

The campus's recipients are Paul Berkman, a research professor at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, and Peter J. Garcia, a visiting professor of ethnomusicology and folklore in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies.

Berkman, a researcher with the Bren School's Program on Governance for Sustainable Development, will spend seven months at Cambridge University laying the foundation for a 2009 conference in Washington, D.C. that will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. The treaty, one of the longest-running multi-national agreements in existence, established Antarctica as a shared domain reserved for the pursuit of peaceful scientific research and study.

The conference, titled "Antarctic Treaty Summit: Science-Policy Interactions in International Governance," will bring together scientists, economists, nonprofit officials, government administrators, and others to examine how the treaty has been managed over the years, the factors that have contributed to its success, and how it can serve as a model for use in non-science contexts.

Garcia, who will be teaching classes at UCSB through winter quarter, will use his fellowship to lecture and conduct research at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico. He will investigate the annual Fiestas de San Francisco in Magdalena, Sonora, as a transitional pilgrimage within the ritualized contexts of popular and traditional musical culture and borderlands aesthetics.

The Fulbright Scholar Program, sponsored by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is America's flagship international educational exchange program. Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has sponsored approximately 273,500 American and foreign scholars. Recipients are selected based on academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields.

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