Four students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were awarded grants under the 2019 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellows Program. Carolina consistently ranks among the top producers of Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellows.
UNC-Chapel Hill was awarded more than $158,000 in funding for the program by the U.S. Department of Education. These fellowships allow doctoral students to pursue dissertation research abroad in foreign language and area studies for six to 12 months. During their research, fellows are able to deepen their subject knowledge and develop skills they would not otherwise be able to through opportunities in the U.S.
The Fulbright Program, of which the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Program is a part, dates back to 1946 when the late U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright sponsored legislation to create the program as a means to increase mutual understanding between the U.S. and the rest of the world.
The 2019 UNC Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellows are listed below in alphabetical order. Three out of the four awardees accepted the fellowship.
Bryan Dougan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. His dissertation, titled “Care in the City: Psychiatry in an Era of Global Heath and Urbanization in Tanzania,” investigates how global attention to mental health shapes the provision of care for those with severe mental disorders, and how historical and emerging urban inequalities in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, shape access to and the delivery of psychiatric care. Throughout 11 months of research, he will observe participants at a psychiatric ward and interview psychiatrists, nurses, psychologists, social workers, and government officials to understand what shapes the conditions of mental health care in Tanzania.
Hometown: Baltimore, MD
Nathan Gill is a doctoral student in the Department of History. His dissertation, “Before There Were Roses: Guachalá and the Environmental Economy of the Ecuadorian Andes,” examines relationships between environmental change and evolving systems of free and forced labor at one of the oldest plantation complexes in the Americas, an Ecuadorian hacienda known as Guachalá. Combining archival research of four centuries of estate operations with geographic mapping, his research explores how Andean estates became laboratories where European elites, indigenous communities, and enslaved Africans experimented with changing patterns of land use, economic production, and political control at key moments in the transition to agrarian capitalism in Latin America.
Hometown: Elon, NC
Donald Santacaterina is a doctoral student in the Department of History. His dissertation, titled “Making the Paper Come Alive: Newspaper Reading Groups, the People’s Daily, and Socialist News Cultures in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1976,” explores how Chinese propaganda cultures, in tandem with global media systems, sought to leverage emotion through entertainment in order to convince audiences of news legitimacy. Through archival work in the People’s Republic of China, Australia, and London, he seeks to explain the mechanisms which have historically shaped global news cultures.
Hometown: Chicago, IL
For more information about the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellows program at UNC-Chapel Hill, visit the Center for Global Initiatives’ website.
Center for Global Initiatives contact: Iyman Ahmed, program manager, iyman@unc.edu
Media contact: Katie Bowler Young, director of global relations, kby@unc.edu