Four University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty have been selected to receive a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year:
- Dr. Oscar Vázquez has received the Fulbright Global Scholar Fellowship.
- Dr. Venugopal Veeravalli has received a Fulbright Scholar award to Finland.
- Dr. Matthew Winters has received a Fulbright Scholar award to the United Kingdom.
- Dr. Peter Wright has received a Fulbright Scholar award to Croatia.
More information about each recipient is listed below the remainder of the article.
As Fulbrighters, recipients will engage in cutting-edge research or instruction while expanding their professional networks in their host country. Through their work, recipients will lay the groundwork for future partnerships and return to their home countries, institutions, labs, and classrooms and be active supporters of international exchange.
"We extend our sincere congratulations to Dr. Vázquez, Dr. Veeravalli, Dr. Winters, and Dr. Wright on their selection as Fulbright Scholars,” said Dr. Sammer Saleh Jones, director for global relations and the university’s Fulbright Scholar liaison. “The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is committed to supporting global learning in all forms and opportunities like the Fulbright Scholar fellowship provide valuable professional development for our colleagues who are already championing international exchange in the classroom.”
More than 800 U.S. scholars – faculty members, artists, and professionals from all backgrounds – teach or conduct research overseas through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program annually. In addition, over 2,000 U.S. students, artists, and early career professionals from all backgrounds in more than 100 different fields of study receive Fulbright U.S. Student Program awards annually to study, teach English, and conduct research overseas.
The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program and is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support. In the United States, the Institute of International Education supports the implementation of the Fulbright U.S. Student and Scholar Programs on behalf of the U.S. Department of State, including conducting an annual competition for the scholarships. For more information about the Fulbright Program, visit https://fulbrightprogram.org.
Award Recipient Bios
Dr. Oscar Vázquez has received the Fulbright Global Scholar Fellowship. Dr. Vázquez (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara) is Professor of Art History with appointments to the Center for Latin American Caribbean Studies, the Latina/o Studies Department, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. His studies in eighteenth through early twentieth century Spanish and Latin American visual cultures have examined the roles of collections, markets, and patronage systems, as well as academies, pedagogy and state administrations in the production and historiography of art. His research and teaching interests range from contemporary graffiti and murals and the construction of spaces by US Latino/as, to the representation of national narratives in Mexico, Spain, and the Caribbean. He is the author of Inventing the Art Collection. Patrons, Markets and the State in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) and The End, Again: Degeneration and the Visual Cultures of Modern Spain (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). He has edited the anthology Academies and Schools of Art in Latin America (Routledge, 2020) and published essays in Art History, Word & Image, and Art Journal among other scholarly periodicals. His most recent project focuses on the practice and politics of copying the human figure as pedagogy and ideology in academies of art.
Dr. Venugopal Veeravalli has received a Fulbright Scholar award to Finland. Dr. Veeravalli (Ph.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) is the Henry Magnuski Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Veeravalli also holds appointments in Department of Statistics, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Information Trust Institute. His research interests span the theoretical areas of statistical inference, machine learning, and information theory, with applications to data science, wireless communications, and sensor networks. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and is currently on Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and previous served on the SPTM Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He is currently the Area Editor for Machine Learning and Statistics for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory; he has been an Associate Editor for Detection and Estimation for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He has also authored and co-authored two books, several book chapters, and dozens of journal articles.
Dr. Matthew Winters has received a Fulbright Scholar award to the United Kingdom. Dr. Winters (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Professor of Political Science with affiliations in the Center for Global Studies, Center for Social and Behavioral Science, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies, Center for African Studies, and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Political from Columbia University. Dr. Winters research explores governance and accountability in lower- and middle-income countries. The primary focus of his early work was on understanding how international development actors respond to variation in the quality of governance in the states where they work. His current work builds on this earlier work but turns primarily to the level of the individual: in several projects, Dr. Winters explore variation in the ways in which citizens react to and use different kinds of information about politics, politicians, and international actors. Dr. Winters previously served on the Council on Foreign Relations / Hitachi International Affairs Fellow in Japan, housed at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. He has also authored and co-authored dozens of book chapters and journal articles.
Dr. Peter Wright has received a Fulbright Scholar award to Croatia. Dr. Wright is Assistant Professor and co-director of undergraduate studies in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures with an affiliation with the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center. His areas of study include the economic and cultural projects of Socialist Yugoslav internationalism. His book manuscript addresses the tension between Yugoslavia’s progressive economic and political vision of a post-colonial world and the way cooperation with states in the Global South helped mark the state as modern, European, and white. Using archival sources, interviews, and cultural texts, his manuscript offers an ethnographic study of the experiences of both Yugoslav development experts in the Global South and postcolonial partners in Yugoslavia as they navigated questions of unequal development, Cold War politics, racism, and the prospects of socialist and non-aligned solidarity. Dr. Wright has a broader interest in themes of race and racialization in the Yugoslav and East European regions. His other writings and pedagogy seek to place Southeastern Europe in a global context that accounts for the complex ways global racial formations shape people’s identities in the region, particularly in the context of Cold War-era development projects and East-South solidarity politics.