NYU Faculty, GSAS Student Selected as Fulbright Fellows

By James Devitt

NYU’s Ann Morning, an assistant professor of sociology, and Jacqueline Bishop, a master teacher in the Faculty of Arts and Science’s Liberal Studies Program, have received Fulbright Fellowships for the 2008-09 academic year. In addition, Robert Chang, a student in the Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS), has received a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Student Award.
    Morning, whose analysis of census data from 138 countries was presented to the United Nations in 2005 and published this year in Population Research and Policy Review, will be in Milan for the upcoming academic year to explore how authoritative institutions in Italy—namely, the state, the media, the academy, and the Catholic Church—depict immigrants in their communications with the public. Italy is second only to Spain among European Union members in terms of net migration. As Italians become increasingly aware of immigration as an ongoing, growing, and far-reaching element of national life, the ways in which the media, researchers, and public figures shape the image of the immigrant could have a long-lasting impact on how newcomers are integrated.
    Morning won the American Sociological Association’s Dissertation Award for her work, The Nature of Race: Teaching and Learning about Human Difference, which was completed at Princeton University and which will be published by the University of California Press.
    Bishop will spend the academic year in Morocco, studying the country’s magazine industry. Her work will focus on how architectural, cuisine, and lifestyle magazines sell and signify Moroccan culture and how these publications meet the challenges of presenting a more complicated view of Morocco than the exotic view often presented in major U.S. publications. She will also explore what organizations, structures, and supports are in place to assist the nation’s fledgling magazine industry.
    Bishop (GSAS ’98, ’00) has authored a novel, My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories from Jamaican Women in New York (2006), and published a collection of her poems, Fauna (2006).
    Chang’s research project, “Immigration, Religious Identity and Canadian Multiculturalism,” is an ethnographic study of East Asian immigrants involved in a Vancouver Buddhist temple. A student in the Department of Anthropology, Chang will analyze the role of religion as new immigrants become transnational Canadians and place it within a broader study of cultural citizenship.
    Administered by the Foundation for Educational Exchange between Canada and the U.S., the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program seeks to enhance mutual understanding between the two countries.