The prestigious Fulbright Program was created to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Fulbright is the world’s largest and most diverse international educational exchange program.
Department of English
Jamie Barber, MFA, is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of English's Academic and Professional Writing Program. She is also currently the director of UB’s Journalism Certificate Program. Prior to UB, she taught writing at Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, and the University of New Hampshire. Barber’s research and publications focus on creative nonfiction, and she is also a published poet and fiction author. She has won awards for writing and teaching. In 2022, she was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship to facilitate student instruction in the area of science communication at the Science Gallery in Bangalore, India.
Department of History
Professor of history and former director of UB’s Humanities Institute, Erik Seeman, PhD, is a noted historian of early America and the Atlantic world whose research focuses on colonial North America; religion, social and cultural history; Indigenous history; and death. He is the author of four books and numerous articles. His most recent book, “Speaking with the Dead in Early America,” won the 2020 Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians for the best book of American cultural history. His work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a 2005 Fulbright Research and Teaching Fellowship. In 2022, he received a Fulbright Scholar Award to teach and conduct research at Erfurt University in Germany.
Department of Geology
Assistant professor of geology and recipient of a 2021 NSF CAREER Award, Elizabeth Thomas, PhD, is a paleoclimatologist and geochemist. Her research aims to understand how past rapid changes in Earth’s climate affected precipitation in various parts of the world—including the Arctic, areas affected by the Asian Monsoon, and the Great Lakes region. She uses organic geochemical and stable isotopic proxies from marine, lake, and loess sediments to reconstruct past precipitation, temperature, and ecological changes during the Pleistocene and Holocene. She also uses climate models to understand the mechanisms that cause such changes, with the goal of better understanding modern global change. Thomas has received a 2022-2023 Fulbright Scholar Award to conduct research in Norway.
