Three Emerson faculty awarded Whiting Travel Fellowships

Three Emerson College faculty were awarded Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation fellowships, funding their travel for research that will contribute to their courses and teaching. The Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation provides travel fellowships to New England university and college professors to study abroad and improve and enhance the quality of their instruction. This year, the foundation received 104 applications and awarded 46 fellowships. Since 2013, the Whiting Foundation has awarded fellowships to 16 Emerson faculty. This year’s Emerson fellows received approximately $7,000 in travel funding each.

Nejem Raheem is a professor in the department of Marketing Communication. The Whiting Fellowship will support his project “Bringing the Tribunal de las Aguas to New Mexico.” In Spain, he will visit the Tribunal de las Aguas, affiliated irrigation systems, and the Universitat Politecnica in Valencia. In New Mexico he will visit the University of New Mexico, the Taos Pueblo, and the New Mexico State University’s Sustainable Agriculture Center in Alcalde. This project will contribute to the first-year interdisciplinary seminar in Sustainability Communication.

Korbett Matthews is an Associate Professor and documentary filmmaker in the Department of Visual and Media Arts. As part of his project “A Baltic Poetic Documentary Study” professor Matthews will travel to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to conduct research and screenings at The Eye Filmmuseusm, The Estonian Film Institute, The Latvian Film Center, The Lithuanian Film Center, The Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council and the National Film School of the Latvian Academy of Culture in order to understand the current state of documentary in the region and gain in-depth expertise of the Baltic Poetic movement and how the language of that new wave has helped shaped a new generation of documentary storytellers and artists.

Catherine Nguyen is an assistant professor in the department of Writing, Literature and Publishing. The Whiting Fellowship will support her project “New Sites of the Vietnamese Diaspora: The Vietnamese in Germany.” She will travel to Germany to explore and learn more about the Vietnamese diaspora in Germany, collect and gather research materials and connect with Vietnamese German cultural producers. This project is part of her new research work as well as part of a new course she is designing called “Creating the Vietnamese Diaspora: Literature, Film, and Art.”