Fulbright Specialists Making an Impact in Iceland

Beatrice Bridglall with University Centre of the Westfjords staff

Icelandic institutions welcome six Fulbright Specialists in late summer and fall of 2024 who worked on a wide variety of projects. They all made a great impact, were highly valued by the host institutions and are important steppingstones to further cooperation.

Gregory Falco from Cornell spent a few weeks in August working with the new disaster response program faculty at Bifröst University and will return next year as a Specialist to teach a course on Security and Compounded Crisis Management. Ukrainian American filmmaker Andriy Semenyuk came from Los Angeles to Reykjavík in August to work with the Iceland University of the Arts Department of Filmmaking. He spent his time in Iceland assisting students on documentary shorts on Ukrainians in Iceland. Read more on this project elsewhere in this newsletter! Beatrice Bridglall, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Student Freedom Initiative, spent two weeks in September and October at the University Centre of the Westfjords working on capacity building in international master’s programs.

Three Fulbright Specialists were at the University of Iceland in the fall. In August JoAnn Conrad from Diablo Valley College joined the Faculty of Folklore, where she led a workshop and offered new perspectives on feminist approaches to folklore. Marcia Van Riper, Professor of Nursing at the University of North Carolina, worked with the School of Health Science in September on the project International Collaboration Concerning Family Nursing. Finally, Rainer Lohmann, Professor of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, came in October to the Faculty of Civil Engineering where he met with faculty and students and held a series of lectures on the topic of emerging organic micropollutants in Icelandic waters.

Rainer Lohmann giving an open talk at the University of Iceland